British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830 9781684483990

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 Webster’s Baroque Experiments and the Testing of Technology in the Early 1600s
Chapter 2 Telling Time in the Fiction of Mary Hearne and Daniel Defoe
Chapter 3 The Technology and Theatricality of Three Hours after Marriage’s “Touch-Stone of Virginity”
Chapter 4 Gulliver’s Travels, Automation, and the Reckoning Author
Chapter 5 Designing the Enlightenment Anthropocene
Chapter 6 Technology, Temporality, and Queer Form in Horace Walpole’s Gothic
Chapter 7 Telegraphic Supremacy in Maria Edgeworth’s “Lame Jervas”
Chapter 8 Percy Shelley, Political Machines, and the Prehistory of the Postliberal
Afterword: on the uses of the history of technology for literary studies and vice versa
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

British Lit­er­at­ ure and Technology, 1600–1830 •

Aperçus: Histories Texts Cultures Series editor: Kat Lecky, Loyola University Chicago Aperçus is a series of books exploring the connections among historiography, culture, and textual repre­sen­ta­tion in vari­ous disciplines. Revisionist in intention, Aperçus seeks monographs as well as guest-­edited multiauthored volumes that stage critical interventions to open up new possibilities for interrogating how systems of knowledge production operate at the intersections of individual and collective thought. We are particularly interested in medieval, Re­nais­sance, early modern, and Restoration texts and contexts. Areas of focus include premodern conceptions and theorizations of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in art, lit­er­a­ture, historical artefacts, medical and scientific works, po­liti­cal tracts, and religious texts; negotiations between local, national, and imperial intellectual spheres; the cultures, lit­er­a­tures, and politics of the excluded and marginalized; print history and the history of the book; the medical humanities; and the cross-­pollination of humanistic and scientific modes of inquiry. Recent titles in the series: British Lit­er­a­ture and Technology, 1600−1830 Kristin M. Girten and Aaron R. Hanlon, eds. Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District: A Geo­graph­i­cal Text Analy­sis Joanna E. Taylor and Ian N. Gregory Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce, and Communication in the Long Eigh­teenth C ­ entury Greg Clingham and Bärbel Czennia, eds. Writing Lives in the Eigh­teenth ­Century Tanya Caldwell, ed. For more information about the series, please visit www​.­bucknelluniversitypress​.­org.

British Lit­er­a­ture and Technology, 1600–1830 •

E d i t e d b y K r i s t i n   M . G i rt e n a n d A a ro n   R . H a n l o n

lewisburg, pen nsylvania

 978-1-68448-396-9 (cloth) 978-1-68448-395-2 (paper) 978-1-68448-397-6 (epub) Cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress. LCCN 2022010612 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2023 by Bucknell University Press Individual chapters copyright © 2023 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-­Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) w ­ ere accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Bucknell University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­bucknelluniversitypress​.­org Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

Contents



Introduction ​ ​ ​1 Kristin M. Girten and Aaron R. Hanlon



1 Webster’s Baroque Experiments and the Testing of Technology in the Early 1600s ​ ​ ​14 Laura Francis



2 Telling Time in the Fiction of Mary Hearne and Daniel Defoe ​ ​ ​31 Erik L. Johnson



3 The Technology and Theatricality of Three Hours ­ after Marriage’s “Touch-­Stone of Virginity” ​ ​ ​46 Thomas A. Oldham

4 Gulliver’s Travels, Automation, and the Reckoning Author ​ ​ ​60 Zachary M. Mann

5

Designing the Enlightenment Anthropocene ​ ​ ​79 Kevin MacDonnell



6 Technology, Temporality, and Queer Form in Horace Walpole’s Gothic ​ ​ ​99 Emily M. West



7 Telegraphic Supremacy in Maria Edgeworth’s “Lame Jervas” ​ ​ ​123 Deven M. Parker



8 Percy Shelley, Po­liti­cal Machines, and the Prehistory of the Postliberal ​ ​ ​139 Jamison Kantor

v

vi C o n t e n t s

Afterword: On the Uses of the History of Technology for Literary Studies and Vice Versa ​ ​ ​164 Joseph Drury Bibliography ​ ​ ​177 Notes on Contributors ​ ​ ​199 Index ​ ​ 203

British Lit­er­at­ ure and Technology, 1600–1830 •

Introduction Kristin M. Girten and Aaron R. Hanlon

What can a poem accomplish? In the case of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “The Mouse’s Petition” (1773), it can save a mouse from a deadly experimental technology. According to the memoirist William Turner, who knew both Barbauld and Joseph Priestley, Barbauld became aware that Priestley had caught a mouse to put to scientific purpose. In a series of experiments that would lead to his discovery of oxygen, Priestley was studying the effects of pumping dif­fer­ent gases into a sealed chamber to commingle with air and would conduct such experiments with a live mouse in the chamber. It was too late in the eve­ning for Priestley to undertake the experiment, so he asked a servant to put the mouse aside for the next day, an exchange Barbauld witnessed. That night she composed the poem in the plaintive voice of the mouse and left the paper bearing the poem “twisted among the wires of the cage,” as Turner reports, for Priestley to find. The next day Priestley found the poem and freed the mouse.1 In this example, we have a literary act (Barbauld’s poem) intervening in a scientific and technological act (Priestley’s experiment), although ­t hese labels suggest a greater degree of distinction between lit­er­a­ture, science, and technology than is realistic. In their landmark study Leviathan and the Air-­Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the phrase ­“ literary technology” to describe one of the three technologies that seventeenth-­ century experimental natu­ral phi­los­o­phers used to produce and establish ­matters of fact. Taking as an illustrative example Robert Boyle’s air-­pump—­a machine that produced a vacuum by drawing air out of a sealed chamber, not unlike what Priestley would use a hundred years l­ater in his oxygen experiments—­Shapin and Schaffer identify “literary technology” as the means by which “the phenomena produced by the pump ­were made known to ­t hose who ­were not direct witnesses.” ­Because the establishment of fact in the seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Royal Society of London for Improving Natu­ral Knowledge paradigm is “both an epistemological and a social” m ­ atter, such that experimental results needed to be demonstrated and communicated, the means by which experimental natu­ral ­phi­los­o­phers 1

2

K r isti n M. Girten a n d A a ron R. H a n lon

achieved this could be understood as technologies. That is, what Shapin and Schaffer call “material,” “literary,” and “social” technologies are “knowledge-­ producing tools” that, like Barbauld’s poem, make something happen.2 They do not constitute scientific practice in and of themselves; they enable it. For the purposes of this volume, we understand technology as a tool—­whether physical or conceptual—­ but not necessarily a tool over which we ­humans have complete control. That is, we proceed from Andrew Feenberg’s view that the idea of technology as “an alien force intruding on our social life from a coldly rational beyond” is illusory.3 In the Baconian sense, technologies always mediate between us and our surroundings, but mediation runs in both directions: we use tools to shape ourselves and our surroundings, and the tools we use come to shape us as well. As Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday demonstrate, the impact of the printing press on the sixteenth ­century (“the first ­century of print”) is analogous to the situation “facing publishers and readers in our own period, the first c­ entury of computers,” and in both scenarios technology is not a passive tool but an active force in shaping social, economic, and po­liti­cal life.4 “Literary technology,” then, is “literary” in the sense that it “dramatized” through “literary exposition” the “forms of social organ­ization” socie­ties of experimental natu­ral phi­los­o­phers took as well as the results of their experiments.5 Shapin and Schaffer call the literary technology that Boyle employed in advertising his air-­pump “virtual witnessing,” b ­ ecause it meant coming up with ways to  describe the material technologies of experiments (the air-­pump itself), the accompanying procedures and social arrangements in experimentation, and the observed results in ways that would earn trust in the integrity of the pro­cess among ­those who could not be pre­sent to see the experiment with their own eyes.6 As more recent scholarship on this topic has shown—­particularly Tita Chico’s The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment—­both the linguistic features common in literary texts and literary texts themselves—­poems, novels, and plays—­were integral to the description and conceptual formation of scientific work in the period. That is, literary technologies included not only the narrative adventures and meta­phorical portrayals common in scientific atlases such as Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) but also fiction such as Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), poems such as Abraham Cowley’s “Ode to the Royal Society” (1667) and Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–1734), and plays such as Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso (1676). Not only did such texts represent and critique experimental science; they also supplied the literary technologies that made science pos­si­ble. What such use of literary technologies suggests—as Shapin and Schaffer’s concept of “literary technology” already captures—is that lit­er­a­ture itself can function as technology.7 This insight, from Shapin and Schaffer to more recent studies by Joanna Picciotto, Courtney Weiss Smith, Joseph Drury, Al Coppola, Tita Chico, and ­others, has allowed lit­er­a­ture scholars and historians of science together to  achieve a profound understanding of how early modern and Enlightenment

I n troduction

3

­science worked.8 Accordingly, studies in which lit­er­a­t ure and technology appear together as objects of inquiry have tended to take the understanding of lit­er­a­ture and science as animating goals, t­oward which understanding lit­er­a­ture as technology has been fruitful. This volume makes contributions to that mission, but it also does something dif­fer­ent. In this volume, we understand not only lit­er­a­ture as technology but also lit­er­a­ture and technology, or the ways literary texts engage with other technologies—­t he textile loom, the steam engine, the telegraph—­not only in representing them but also in shaping their cultural meanings and functions. In Questioning Technology, Andrew Feenberg emphasizes technology’s “ambivalence”: its “availability . . . ​for alternative developments with dif­fer­ent social consequences.”9 Our volume shows that Enlightenment authors ­were readily aware of such ambivalence. In fact, in many cases, they influenced technological consequences (and in some instances technological developments) by influencing technologies’ reception. As Feenberg explains, “broad society-­w ide ­factors . . . ​shape technology ­behind the backs of the actors.”10 Writing at the dawn of the Industrial Age, the authors whom our contributors discuss actively participate in such “shaping.” By witnessing their interventions in emerging technological developments, our volume challenges the cultural phenomenon whereby “technology rigidifies into necessity” and thereby refutes technology’s autonomy. Like history, technology is made, not born. It is, in Feenberg’s words, “the medium of daily life in modern socie­ties,” continually developing in concert with social, civic, and economic life, from quotidian agricultural practices to transatlantic communication.11 Technologies are far more than the sum of their gears and screws. Embedded within them is a diverse history of “tinkering” performed not only by the scientists who apply their technical knowledge to physical m ­ atter but also by writers working across genres and employing underacknowledged forms of technical expertise: choosing the right meta­phor, plotting speculative fictional narratives, or making close observations of a given technology’s operation and impact in the social world. “If science and technology are intimately related concepts,” asks Jennifer L. Lieberman, “why pull technology out as a subject that might be studied with lit­er­a­ture but separately from science?”12 Lieberman’s question raises two considerations, both essential to this volume. One is about the history of knowledge organ­ization, in par­tic­u ­lar the structure of science studies as a field or cluster of fields and the influence of this structure on the proportion of research that focuses on science versus technology. Among historians, the study of science and of technology has been divided into distinct professional socie­ties with their own journals.13 D.S.L. Cardwell attributes this separation to “the power­f ul influence of certain phi­los­ o­phers of science, in par­tic­u ­lar ­those brought up in that mainland Eu­ro­pean tradition that emphasized the distinction between the ‘pure’ science of the universities and the other sort, as practised and taught in the technical high schools.”14 In contrast to the history of science centered on “pure” or basic science, the history of technology, as Cardwell notes, “was pop­u­lar­ized [in the nineteenth century] by Samuel Smiles who celebrated the triumph of the hero-­engineer,” the builder of “roads, canals, railways, harbours,” and the like.15 Further, as Paul

4

K r isti n M. Girten a n d A a ron R. H a n lon

Forman argues, the primacy that modernity assigned to science (of the sort Cardwell calls “pure” science) over technology led historians of technology, when the discipline became institutionalized in the mid-­twentieth ­century, to “keep science out—­and, where it could not be kept out, to put it down.”16 This is not necessarily the attitude that governs the relationship between the history of science and the history of technology t­oday, though it helps explain why t­hese intimately related histories sometimes sit uneasily with each other. The second consideration that Lieberman’s question raises is both orga­nizational and epistemological, the question of what has been the relationship between science and technology and to what extent it is pos­si­ble or valuable to distinguish between the two. Techne has always implied a distinction between making or ­doing and understanding, or a distinction between knowledge-­how and knowledge-­that. Yet Enlightenment natu­ral philosophers—­particularly ­those of the Royal Society—­ frequently collapsed this distinction by emphasizing what Robert Hooke called “useful knowledge” in his preface to Micrographia (1665).17 In this sense, it would seem impossible to extricate seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century science and technology from each other. For this reason, our focus on lit­er­a­ture and technology in this volume should be understood as a heuristic shift in emphasis, as opposed to an effort to instantiate a false division. What Lieberman suggests might be a valuable “separation” of science and technology is for us not a ­matter of separation but heuristic emphasis, given the ways the study of lit­er­a­ture and technology has been subsumed u ­ nder the study of lit­er­a­ture and science. Even within academic journals that combine the study of science, technology, and lit­er­a­ture, the imbalance of “science” versus “technology” coverage is stark. As Lieberman notes, “the subject search terms lit­er­a­ture and technology call up sixteen articles in Configurations, compared to the fifty-­nine articles retrieved by the subject search terms lit­er­a­ture and science.18 If we turn more expressly to literary studies per se, a comparable search in the MLA International Bibliography retrieves 4,340 articles on the subjects “lit­er­a­ture and technology” and 11,225 articles on “lit­er­a­ture and science.” Such metrics have obvious limitations—­for example, articles that discuss lit­er­a­ture and science may also discuss technology implicitly—­yet they offer a rough impression of the relative visibility of “science” and “technology” as concepts within literary studies and science studies. That eighteenth-­century phi­los­o­phers themselves readily acknowledged, and indeed regularly celebrated, the link between science and technology (which at the time w ­ ere designated “natu­ral philosophy” and “practical arts”) makes the current tendency of lit­er­a­ture scholars to emphasize the former while downplaying, if not completely excluding, the latter particularly detrimental. Formal socie­ties designed to foster and exhibit innovative practical applications of scientific discoveries proliferated throughout the eigh­teenth ­century.19 The “pro­gress of knowledge” that Bacon and his disciples pursued was far from purely philosophical in nature. A cornerstone of Bacon’s inductive empirical method was its close identification with embodied experience. Not only did experience inform this widely ­adopted method, however; it was also perceived to reap the harvest of the new

I n troduction

5

method. As Bacon explains, “We are laying the foundations not of a sect or of a dogma, but of ­human pro­g ress and empowerment.”20 For Bacon and the Royal Society that would take up his mantle, the “­Great Instauration” entailed not simply a “pro­gress of knowledge” but a pro­gress of civilization, a pro­gress of humanity. In coming to know nature, we would come to know how to manipulate it for ­human benefit and thus ensure “the victory of art over nature.”21 In other words, the practical application of knowledge was at least as impor­tant as, if not more than, a conception of pure knowledge without use. Knowledge was not pursued simply for knowledge’s sake. It was pursued out of a conviction of its practical—­ and thus technological—­value. Indeed, technological innovation was a hallmark of the pro­gress envisioned and pursued by Enlightenment-­era men of science. According to David Spadafora, “for the most part, the adherents of the moderns w ­ ere triumphant and their belief in pro­gress in the arts and sciences prevailed.”22 Advances in technology ­were instrumental in providing evidence of, and thus inspiring faith in, such pro­gress. Bacon’s editor, Lisa Jardine, suggests that t­ hose who would offer financial support to Bacon and his followers viewed such advances as of greater importance than the acquisition of knowledge itself: “The kinds of investors [Bacon] seeks for his ­Great Instauration need to know they can expect to make a rapid profit. . . . ​[T]hey ­will need to see immediate pay-­off in the form of enhanced procedures in traditional trade and manufacture.”23 The main goal of the London Society of Arts was, as its founder, William Shipley, explains, “to embolden enterprise, to enlarge Science, to refine Art, to improve our Manufactures, and extend our Commerce; in a word, to render ­Great Britain the school of instruction, as it is already the centre of traffic to the greatest part of the known world.”24 Similar ambitions informed the many other “improving” socie­ties founded across E ­ ngland, Scotland, and Ire25 land during the historical Enlightenment. To consult the writings and proceedings of such socie­ties is to develop a sense of the profound optimism that many men of science came to feel as a result of their collaborative endeavors. It is also to appreciate the emphasis ­t hese men placed on practical applications of science that produced technological advancements, particularly when such advancements benefited industry and, thus, “commerce.” Enthusiasm for science and technology went hand in hand with national pride. According to Shipley and many other innovators like him, new technological developments could even contribute to the imagining, building, and exporting of the nation. Th ­ ese developments played an impor­tant role in the story of pro­gress that British “Moderns” like Shipley sought to tell and pursue. However, not every­one shared Shipley’s optimistic view of technological innovation. Satirists regularly targeted the new science, and as they did so, modern technologies regularly came ­under fire. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels offers a particularly memorable example. Both its Brobdingnag and Laputa voyages prominently target the faith and reverence that modern natu­ral phi­los­o­phers invested in the technologies that their scientific practices employed and often helped to pop­ u­lar­ize.26 For example, in a conversation about politics and civil affairs, the King

6

K r isti n M. Girten a n d A a ron R. H a n lon

of Brobdingnag is “struck with Horror at the Description” Gulliver has just given of E ­ ngland’s use of gunpowder-­f ueled firearms to s­ ettle international disputes.27 While Gulliver conveys g­ reat patriotic pride in E ­ ngland’s use of this centuries’ old “Invention,” the King is appalled at how Gulliver can “appear wholly unmoved at all the Scenes of Blood and Desolation, which [he] had painted as the common Effects of ­t hose destructive Machines.”28 Swift’s satire encourages readers to side with the King when he remarks that “some evil Genius ­Enemy to Mankind, must have been the first Contriver” of firearm technologies.29 ­Here as elsewhere in the work, modern ­England appears uncivilized and barbaric, in spite of Gulliver’s best attempts to garner appreciation for its modern innovations, technological and other­w ise. The early Enlightenment writer and phi­los­o­pher Margaret Cavendish also challenges enthusiasm for modern technological advances—­specifically, observational technologies such as the microscope and the telescope. She asserts, “Wherefore ­t hose that in­ven­ted microscopes, and such like dioptrical glasses, at first, did, in my opinion, the world more injury than benefit.”30 According to Cavendish, in a chapter titled “Of Micrography, and of Magnifying and Multiplying Glasses,” though experimentalists regularly employed modern observational technologies to expand their capacity for perception, such technologies w ­ ere distorting rather than revealing: “Magnifying, multiplying, and the like optic glasses, may, and do oftentimes pre­sent falsely the picture of an exterior object; I say, the picture, ­because it is not the real body of the object which the glass pre­sents but the glass only figures or patterns out the picture presented in and by the glass, and ­there ­mistakes may easily be committed in taking copies from copies.”31 Cavendish maintains that, far from ensuring a detached and thus reliable access to specimens as experimentalists perceived them to do, microscopes manipulate and therefore pre­ sent a highly misleading and unreliable mediated depiction of them. She goes on to say that the “art” of using “dioptrical glasses . . . ​has intoxicated so many men’s brains, and wholly employed their thoughts and bodily actions about phenomena, or the exterior figures of objects, as all better arts and studies are laid aside.”32 Both Swift and Cavendish perceive enthusiasts for modern technology as gullible, deluded, and even childish: As boys that play with watery ­bubbles or fling dust into each other’s eyes, or make a hobby­horse of snow, are worthy of reproof rather than praise, for wasting their time with useless sports, so ­t hose that addict themselves to unprofitable arts, spend more time than they reap benefit thereby. . . . ​Nay, could they benefit men ­either in husbandry, architecture, or the like necessary and profitable employments; yet before the vulgar sort would learn to understand them, the world would want bread to eat, and ­houses to dwell in, as also clothes to keep them from the incon­ve­niences of the inconstant weather.33

For critics of modern technology such as Cavendish and Swift, zeal for innovative technologies (“unprofitable arts”), which became widespread during the historical Enlightenment, had the effect of distracting natu­ral phi­los­o­phers from finding

I n troduction

7

solutions to basic prob­lems. They portrayed technological zealots much like Swift portrays the Phi­los­o­pher at the end of his “The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit”: “while his Thoughts and Eyes ­were fixed upon the Constellations, [he] found himself seduced by his lower Parts into a Ditch.”34 The promise of modern technology was ­great but, according to some detractors, it was exaggerated and could even prove treacherous. Focusing on convergences between lit­er­a­ture and technology during the historical Enlightenment (and immediately before and a­ fter it), the essays in our collection register the impor­tant role writers in dif­fer­ent genres played in mediating Enlightenment technologies and pro­g ress. Attending to lesser-­k nown works, or pursuing new approaches to well-­k nown ones, the following essays help us expand our appreciation of how tenuous the faith in a progressive Enlightenment narrative could be. Indeed, many of the essays in the collection portray how authors developed biting critiques of this narrative and the technological innovations that informed it. Analyzed through the framework of Enlightenment technology and pro­g ress, and understood in this volume as technologies in and of themselves, familiar works such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels reveal themselves in new ways. Although we have structured the volume in chronological order, vari­ous themes emerge across the volume that pre­sent other ways of categorizing the chapters and of understanding their relationship to one another. For instance, chapters 1 and 2, by Laura Francis and Erik L. Johnson, respectively, emphasize lit­er­a­ture’s function as a technology. Chapters 3 through 7, by Thomas A. Oldham, Zachary M. Mann, Kevin MacDonnell, Emily M. West, and Deven M. Parker, highlight how literary works engaged specific contemporaneous technologies, such as the automated loom, the steam engine, the telegraph, and o ­ thers. The volume concludes with an essay by Jamison Kantor in which technology functions somewhat differently than it does in the other chapters—as a meta­phor that helps us understand the concept of “po­liti­cal machinery.” Our collection begins with Laura Francis’s case study of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, which sets an impor­tant foundation for the collection as a ­whole as it demonstrates that British lit­er­a­ture of the long Enlightenment era did not simply regularly depict new technologies but could also serve as a technology in and of itself. According to Francis, with The Duchess of Malfi, Webster employs theater as an instrument for submitting innovations of the new science to public scrutiny and evaluation, ultimately inviting his audience to develop a healthy skepticism not only about the reliability of empirical instruments (such as the compass) but also about sense perception in general. Francis’s analy­sis demonstrates that literary authors joined natu­ral phi­los­o­phers in “shaping the technological and epistemological shifts of their time.” In chapter 2, Erik L. Johnson develops a novel approach to Robinson Crusoe as he pursues connections between Mary Hearne’s and Daniel Defoe’s depictions of time. According to Johnson, both authors pose a similar challenge to “the modern, technologically mediated experience of time,” which coincided with, and

8

K r isti n M. Girten a n d A a ron R. H a n lon

helped to reinforce, John Locke’s “durational model of experience” and the consistency of time it implied. Johnson argues that Hearne and Defoe appeal to an older Augustinian notion of time that is based on an analogy between the pre­sent and the eternal and that, in contrast to Locke, perceives time as relative and variable. Designed to register time’s consistency, horological technologies had become increasingly valued and available over the first ­couple of de­cades of the eigh­teenth ­century. Johnson shows that Hearne and Defoe qualify the value of t­ hese technologies, suggesting that they misrepresent time by “homogenizing” it. Thus, they implicitly challenge the pro­gress that horological innovations ­were presumed to enable, introducing the work of Hearne and Defoe as narrative technologies. With chapter 3 by Thomas A. Oldham, our volume begins to consider how authors directly addressed and sometimes ­shaped specific technologies and their reception. Oldham turns our attention to the 1717 Scriblerian satire Three Hours ­after Marriage—­a collaboration between John Gay, Alexander Pope, and John Arbuthnot. He argues that the play directs its critique at new gynecological technologies and, in ­doing so, undercuts the control over female bodies that such technologies ­were widely presumed to enable. According to Oldham, it emphasizes “the performativity of all w ­ omen” and, si­mul­ta­neously, the incapacity of controlling technologies to penetrate such per­for­mance. However, he also shows how the play documents “the debasement of female agency” that accompanied the employment of such technologies: though the technologies, and the knowledges that inform and/or result from them, may be laughable, their effects are nevertheless real and profoundly felt by the ­women who are their targets. Ultimately, ­women are shown within the play to be reduced to commodities, “a mere exchangeable set of goods.” In chapter 4, Zachary M. Mann offers a new way of seeing the Brobdingnag voyage in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Acknowledging the scholarly emphasis on the third voyage as a critique of Royal Society experimentalism and concerns about the production of scientific fact, Mann turns our attention instead to the changing industrial climate with which Swift was intimate as a po­liti­cal actor during the early eigh­teenth ­century. Mann argues not only that the textile industry and accompanying inventions of textile machines—­the automated loom in particular—­loomed large in Swift’s imagination but also that Gulliver’s Travels reflects Swift’s awareness of and participation in the industrialization of intellectual ­labor. In chapter 5, we shift from the loom to the steam engine, patented by James Watt in 1784, as Kevin MacDonnell considers an unexpected influence on the engine’s design: William Hogarth’s princi­ple of the “line of beauty,” which he presented in his 1753 The Analy­sis of Beauty. MacDonnell finds in par­tic­u­lar that the most innovative component of Watt’s 1784 engine—­Watt’s parallel linkage—­“ is born out of the same epistemological foundations that underpin” Hogarth’s line of beauty. By examining the ostensibly superficial resemblance between Watt’s linkage and Hogarth’s line of beauty, MacDonnell demonstrates a common response, in the realms of technology and visual art, to “the geometrical straitjacket of

I n troduction

9

c­ on­temporary design.” MacDonnell extends this comparison of aesthetic princi­ ples to an analy­sis of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), showing how design princi­ples of the historical Enlightenment not only contributed to what we now call Anthropocene ways of knowing and making but also undermined their implementation. Chapter 6 invites a reconsideration of Horace Walpole’s foundational Gothic novel The ­Castle of Otranto (1764) by offering a textual analy­sis of Walpole’s “gothic lanthorn,” which hung in the well of the staircase at Strawberry Hill, an estate that Walpole rebuilt in multiple stages in the style of the Gothic Revival. Walpole offered public tours of the h ­ ouse, and the lantern was among the first and most striking features visitors would see. Placing the lantern and its function within queer histories and histories of domesticity, Emily M. West shows how we can understand the lantern as an artifact of queer intimacies, arguing that the lantern pre­sents a “critique of the heteropatriarchal f­ amily as a social form.” In so d ­ oing, West brings the lantern as a technology into conversation with broader histories of optical technology in the period, demonstrating how Walpole’s “curious” lantern is an artifact of queer materiality that challenged “linear narratives of rational modernity and the mechanisms conscripted to produce Enlightenment f­ utures.” In chapter 7, Deven M. Parker turns our attention to an underexplored short story by Maria Edgeworth from 1807, “Lame Jervas,” with the aim of investigating what the story reveals about eighteenth-­century British anx­i­eties about foreign technologies and the mechanisms used to alleviate them. The optical telegraph was, as Parker documents, a technology of par­tic­u ­lar concern around the turn of the ­century, due to France’s recent telegraphic innovations and British fears about the possibility that it could be used as a tool of international surveillance. It was also, though, a promising technology for Britain, for it was perceived to afford new ways of protecting the nation’s coastline from France. Maria Edgeworth was influenced by her ­father, Lovell Edgeworth, who had attempted (albeit unsuccessfully) to promote a telegraphic signaling device of his own invention, and her “Lame Jervas” expresses an optimistic view of telegraphic technologies, portraying them as a tool by which Britain may not only defend itself against foreign intrusion but also perform “British superiority” and, in so d ­ oing, position itself for pursuing its “imperial proj­ect.” Thus, Parker’s essay offers an example of one British literary author who harbored significant enthusiasm for the potential of technology to secure ­England’s f­ uture and to foster pro­gress as well as peace. In chapter 8, Jamison Kantor pursues a provocative analy­sis of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems The Mask of Anarchy (1819) and The Triumph of Life (1822) as guides for understanding the “po­liti­cal machine.” Kantor argues that Shelley’s interests in mechanical engineering and vehicular technology positioned him to offer a power­ful critique of “state machinery” and the machine meta­phor as a way of representing and governing social relations. In a departure from the critical focus on the notion of the finance economy as an automated, self-­governing machine, Kantor reevaluates links between the po­liti­cal formation of the modern state and the development of industrial machinery.

10

K r isti n M. Girten a n d A a ron R. H a n lon

While ­these chapters address a formidable range of texts, topics, and technologies, they have in common the aim of showing how even critical engagements with technology from roughly 1600 to 1830 helped shape technologies’ functions and meanings in the world. By “shape,” we mean that in some cases literary and aesthetic considerations contributed to the development of material technologies, while in o ­ thers, the textual treatment of technology impacted how p ­ eople understood and engaged with it. In other cases, as we have suggested, the literary text functioned as a technology in its own right, a tool that made something happen. In his 2017 monograph Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain, Joseph Drury emphasizes how profoundly the eighteenth-­ century novel registered the effects of technological innovation, “respond[ing] with new urgency to the concerns raised by Britain’s so-­called ‘Industrial Enlightenment,’ a culture of unpre­ce­dented technological innovation and ingenuity.”35 The pre­sent collection broadens this scope by surveying how literary works of vari­ous genres engaged with technological innovation. Like Drury, the authors ­here regularly show how literary works express “ambivalence” about the pro­ gress that was so often, and by so many p ­ eople, associated with technological innovation.36 We share Drury’s “constructivist” recognition that “dif­fer­ent machines prompt very dif­fer­ent concerns in the eigh­teenth c­ entury, while the same machine may have dif­fer­ent, even antithetical meanings in dif­fer­ent circumstances.”37 By casting our net widely, considering not only a wide range of technologies but also a wide range of genres, we aim to expand scholars’, teachers’, and students’ frameworks for understanding the multivalent relationship between lit­er­a­ture and technology in the era of Enlightenment. Much scholarly and public disputation over the legacies of the historical Enlightenment, particularly its scientific and technological legacies, has taken the form of opposition between t­hose who understand the Enlightenment as a story of pro­g ress and ­those who are skeptical of pro­g ress narratives engendered by Enlightenment historiography. Although the chapters in this volume focus on texts and histories frequently critical of the progressive view of Enlightenment technology, they do so, as we have suggested, to provide a picture of the interrelation of literary text and material technology. We share Donna Haraway’s view that “taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-­science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the bound­aries of daily life, in partial connection with ­others, in communication with all of our parts.”38 Consequently, this volume functions less to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-­down view of Enlightenment technological development than to provide a mosaic view of how literary texts checked and critiqued technological developments as well as helped constitute and enable such developments. In this mosaic view, writers of novels, poems, and plays do not stand athwart technological development yelling “Stop!” Rather, they ­reimagine the possibilities of technology and play a role in realizing t­ hose possibilities.

I n troduction

11

In recent de­cades, with the flourishing of environmental humanities, the Enlightenment has become a common target of blame for t­ hose who are seeking to identify the roots of the ­human tendency to cause environmental devastation. James Watt’s patenting of the steam engine in 1784 is widely cited as the beginning of what has come to be known as the “Anthropocene,” our current geological age in which ­human be­hav­ior has become the primary influence on our biosphere. According to this line of thinking, the Enlightenment is significantly responsible for having established the foundation for global warming and the mass extinctions with which we must now contend. Twenty-­first-­century ecocritics have sought to demystify much of what was perceived as “pro­gress” by Enlightenment thinkers, countering the progressive view of the Enlightenment with narratives of destruction, exploitation, and degeneration. However, as the Enlightenment-­era “Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns” attests, critiques of pro­gress ­were far from uncommon in the Enlightenment era itself.39 The pre­sent collection attests to how ­adept vari­ous literary authors of the Enlightenment w ­ ere at scrutinizing technologies and the pro­gress they so often w ­ ere seen to represent. It also illustrates how common it was for them to do so. We therefore propose that the Enlightenment should be viewed as having laid the foundation not only for destructive conceptions of pro­gress but also for the critique of such conceptions. The first steps ­toward interrogating Enlightenment technologies ­were taken from within, and lit­er­a­ture was instrumental in paving the path. In the early years of the nineteenth c­ entury, William Blake offered a skeptical portrayal of technology when, in his poem Milton, he asked, “And did the Countenance Divine, / Shine forth upon our clouded hills? / And was Jerusalem builded ­here, / Among t­ hese dark Satanic Mills?”40 A distinguishing feature of the Industrial Age, technological innovation was inextricable from the development of modern factories (Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills”). Thus, to critique the latter was to be at least circumspect about, if not equally critical of, the former. Such suspicion of technology persists t­oday, though it has both expanded and become significantly qualified. One need not be a Marxist to bemoan the negative psychological impacts of “too much screen time,” which has over the past de­cade or so been linked to depression.41 However, technology has become so ubiquitous in the everyday life of inhabitants of the Global North that its presence tends to be taken for granted. Haraway argues that “by the late twentieth ­century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs.”42 Inhabitants of the Global North have not only grown accustomed to technology but have internalized it to such an extent that it has become a part of our personal identities. How bereft most of us feel when rare circumstances require us to do without our cars, smartphones, and personal computers—­not to mention our refrigerators and HVAC systems. When the power goes out in our homes, we hardly know what to do with ourselves. We may be suspicious of technology, but most of us cannot imagine living without it. Our volume registers the deep history of such ambivalence about technology. Writers during the historical

12

K r isti n M. Girten a n d A a ron R. H a n lon

Enlightenment had not yet come to take the presence of technology for granted. However, they w ­ ere, much like us, regularly both attracted to and repelled by its potential. Moreover, they had already begun to perceive themselves as “chimeras”—­ “hybrids of machine and organism.” Our volume shows how lit­er­a­ture across genres provided impor­tant sites for understanding and tinkering with this distinctively modern sense of the cyborgian self in the long Enlightenment period. Exploring such sites, we become better equipped to appreciate the modern self for what it is: “a creature of social real­ity as well as a creature of fiction.”43

notes 1.  Mary Ellen Bellanca, “Science, Animal Sympathy, and Anna Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition,’ ” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 37, no. 1 (2003): 47–48. 2.  Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985), 25. 3.  Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (London: Routledge, 1999), viii. 4.  Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, “Introduction: Paperworlds: Imagining the Re­nais­sance Computer,” in The Re­nais­sance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print, ed. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–2. 5.  Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, 25. 6.  Ibid., 61. 7.  Shapin and Schaffer chose the term “literary technology” with recognition of the etymology of “technology.” They note Plato’s division of techne into two forms, one associated with physical work and the other with speech. In this sense, “technology” already implies both the physical/mechanical and the verbal or literary. See Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, 25n4. 8.  See Joanna Picciotto, ­Labors of Innocence in Early Modern ­England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Courtney Weiss Smith, Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eighteenth-­Century E ­ ngland (Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 2016); Joseph Drury, Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Al Coppola, The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natu­ral Philosophy in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); and Tita Chico, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). 9. Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 7. 10.  Ibid., 11. 11.  Ibid., 14, vii. 12.  Jennifer L. Lieberman, “Finding a Place for Technology,” Journal of Lit­er­a­ture and Science 10, no. 1 (2017): 26. 13.  Ibid., 27. 14. D.S.L. Cardwell, “Science, Technology, and Industry,” in The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-­Century Science, ed. Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 452. 15.  Ibid., 450. 16.  Paul Forman, “The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology,” History and Technology 23, nos. 1–2 (2007): 53. 17. Robert Hooke, Micrographia; or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (London: Martyn and Allestree, 1665), preface. 18.  Lieberman, “Finding a Place for Technology,” 25. 19.  David Spadafora, The Idea of Pro­gress in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 76–84. See also Roger Hahn, “The Application of Science to Society: The Socie­ties of Arts,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury 25 (1963): 829–836; James  E. McClellan III, Science Reor­ga­nized: Scientific Socie­ties in the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

I n troduction

13

20.  Francis Bacon, The New Organon, trans. and ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13. 21.  Ibid., 91. 22. Spadafora, The Idea of Pro­gress, 84. 23.  Lisa Jardine, introduction to Bacon, The New Organon, xiv. 24.  William Shipley, “A Proposal to Establish a Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge in the County of Kent. Addressed to the Inhabitants of the Said County” (1786), printed in D.G.C. Allan, William Shipley, Founder of the Royal Society of Arts: A Biography with Documents, corr. ed. (London: Scolar Press, 1979), 203. 25. Spadafora, The Idea of Pro­gress, 76–84. 26.  Gulliver’s Brobdingnag voyage is often read as an allegory of modern microscopy. See, for instance, Kristin  M. Girten, “Mingling with ­Matter: Tactile Microscopy and the Philosophic Mind in Brobdingnag and Beyond,” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 54, no.  4 (2013): 497–520; Deborah Needleman Armintor, “The Sexual Politics of Microscopy in Brobdingnag,” SEL 47, no.  3 (2007): 619–640; Christopher Fox, “Introduction: How to Prepare a Noble ­Savage: The Spectacle of ­Human Science,” in Inventing H ­ uman Science: Eighteenth-­Century Domains, ed. Roy Porter Fox and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press,1995), 1–30; Marjorie Nicolson, “The Microscope and En­glish Imagination,” Smith College Studies in Modern Languages 16, no. 4 (1935): 1–92. 27.  Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, vol. 11, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941), 118. 28.  Ibid., 118–119. 29.  Ibid., 119. 30.  Margaret Cavendish, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. Eileen O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 51. 31.  Ibid., 50–51. 32.  Ibid., 51. 33.  Ibid., 52. 34.  Jonathan Swift, “A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” in The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins (New York: Norton, 2010), 125. 35. Drury, Novel Machines, 2. 36. Ibid. 37.  Ibid., 10. For the precise sense of “constructivism” a­ dopted by Drury, see Feenberg, Questioning Technology. 38.  Donna Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and ­Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149. This essay was originally published in Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65–108. 39.  According to Fredric Jameson, this Quarrel helped to usher in the “birth of historicity.” Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Pre­sent (London: Verso, 2013), 21–22. 40.  William Blake, Milton, in The Complete Illuminated Books (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 446. 41.  See, for instance, Elroy Boers, Mohammad H. Afzali, Nicola Newton, and Patricia Conrod, “Association of Screen Time and Depression in Adolescence,” JAMA Pediatrics 173, no. 9 (2019): 853–859. 42.  Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 149. 43.  Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­Feminism in the Late Twentieth ­Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and ­Women, 149.

chapter 1

•

Webster’s Baroque Experiments and the Testing of Technology in the Early 1600s Laura Francis

While the latter half of the 1600s may have witnessed ­England’s most famous contributions to the Scientific Revolution, Jacobean London was already teeming with the technological activity that would help usher it in. Clockmakers, lens grinders, and mathematicians settled across several neighborhoods.1 Mechanisms made noise throughout the streets.2 Advertisements for the newest devices competed with playbills for attention around the Blackfriars’ district.3 Technology was a part of daily life as always, and the latest innovations w ­ ere often spurred by cross-­cultural exchanges at the time: as the scholars Deborah Harkness and Adam Cohen have shown, the translation of numerous technological treatises as well as the immigration of Dutch, Italian, French, and Spanish instrument makers created networks of influence that reached well beyond the borders of the burgeoning En­g lish empire.4 Galileo, Kepler, and o ­ thers may have been mapping the heavens with their refracting telescopes from the continent, but their technologies—as well as the consequences of their observations—­were making their way into London. This chapter explores how con­temporary writers helped shape such exchanges. According to Michel Foucault’s seminal, if debated, arguments in The Order of ­Things, the influx of technology also came with a wave of epistemological shifts and repre­sen­ta­tional prob­lems. Sixteenth-­century Eu­rope relied heavi­ly on linguistic relations like aemulation, con­ve­nientia, analogy, and sympathy/antipathy to structure humanity’s relationship to nature and the heavens, but a tabular order of ­t hings began to overtake this system in the Enlightenment: mathesis, taxinomia, and genesis began to define relationships on empirical data rather than the meta­phorical “prose of the world.”5 Such large-­scale changes in the organ­ization of knowledge do not occur in a day, of course, and historians of science have already shown how natu­ral phi­los­o­phers w ­ ere working through the epistemic prob­lems 14

W e b s t e r’s B a r o q u e E x p e r i m e n t s

15

coming hand in hand with the development of technology.6 Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-­Morris have argued that the unpre­ce­dented powers being ascribed to instruments created an alienating dilemma throughout the 1600s, for example. They assert that the idea of granting authority to devices meant admitting that the “­human eye is nothing but an instrument, and a weak one at that. . . . ​Paradoxically, accurate scientific observation and the naturalized understanding of the senses detached the intellect from its objects.”7 Empirical precision thus came with disturbing implications for the interconnected nature of body and mind. The very language of truth was moreover at stake as intellectuals like Sir Francis Bacon debated w ­ hether figurative or “plain” speech could better communicate the evidence of observation to o ­ thers.8 It is perhaps unsurprising that the repre­sen­ta­tional prob­lems surrounding technology and observation involved artists as well as natu­ral phi­los­o­phers, then. Historians have also shown how paint­ers, particularly baroque paint­ers, participated in such epistemic changes. Gal and Chen-­Morris argue that the extreme character of the baroque can be seen as more than a de­cadent extroversion or illogical playfulness amid the rise of the tabular ­orders. It is “a genuine investigation of the possibilities of the artificial sense organs,” a counterpart rather than anathema to the “mathematical New Science,” a study of “orderliness and the problematic means of producing it.”9 The likes of Rubens, Bettini, and Vermeer thus questioned the changing organ­izations of knowledge in their works on sensory perception alongside natu­ral phi­los­o­phers of their day.10 Pushing this even further, recent scholarship has proposed that paintings, drawings, and engravings w ­ ere instruments for the artist and astronomer alike. Both used such tools to shape their arguments for distant readers, and both made vision itself into a per­for­mance.11 The demonstrations of Brunelleschi’s mathematical perspective and Galileo’s refracting telescope similarly turned the vari­ous ways of viewing the world into spectacles for viewers to judge.12 En­glish lit­er­a­ture’s contributions to such dilemmas have not been studied quite as fully in this active sense, however. While ­great strides have been made to understand the presence of technology in writing, such as foundational studies on technological meta­phors in Shakespeare, they tend to emphasize lit­er­a­t ure’s role as receptor, consumer, and/or mediator for public opinion rather than potential contributor itself.13 This unidirectional trend leaves much room for exploration in the history of intersections between the arts and sciences in a time when they ­were not necessarily considered separate fields of knowledge.14 How did authors respond to the alienating effects of technological advances and movements into the tabular o ­ rders, then? And, like baroque painting and mathematical perspective, how might we see writing as an instrument that turned ­t hese changing ways of seeing the world into spectacles for audiences to judge? Following the work of art historians, as well as recent studies pushing our understanding of literary engagement with the sciences, I posit that En­glish lit­er­a­ture of the early 1600s not only demonstrated an awareness of con­temporary technology and natu­ral philosophy but also explored their bound­aries.15 Poets and especially dramatists turned their

16

L au r a F r a n c i s

c­ ontemporaries’ tools and theories into per­for­mances to test the extent of their truth-­making powers while challenging audiences to do the same. John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (performed 1613; published 1623) offers an ideal case study for investigating this kind of experimental engagement. Although the relationship between Webster’s tragedy and con­temporary anatomy theaters has been explored quite extensively, few studies have analyzed its relationship to technology or natu­ral philosophy.16 Scholars have traditionally tended to interpret the play in relation to tainted bloodlines, the rise of the merchant class, and moral philosophy, all indeed compelling lines of criticism considering the primary subject ­matter.17 Two of the main characters (Ferdinand and the Cardinal) punish their ­sister (the Duchess) for marrying a man below her rank without their consent, and the result is a bloody spectacle rife with strange plots, wax figures of her lifeless ­family, the death of almost ­every character, and the establishment of a tenuous new line through her half-­aristocratic, half-­bourgeois son. Yet the play also contains a rich engagement with the sciences of the day. Webster uses over thirty meta­phors involving con­temporary instruments and mathe­matics, regularly discusses the effects of the senses on the mind, and employs a destitute university gradu­ate as its primary intelligencer-­a rtificer, all providing rich material for understanding how playwriting could work as a testing ground for the changing order of ­t hings. If we attend to the repre­sen­ta­tion of technology and natu­ral philosophy in Webster’s work, we can see how he turned his contemporaries’ devices and ways of seeing into spectacles for his audiences to judge. His speeches load the characters’ interactions with technological references. His torture scenes reveal how his wax puppets physically embody the classical meta­phors for sensory perception to test the precision of bodily instruments. His strange echoes emphasize how the script plagues spectators as much as characters in its sensory dilemmas. In sum, The Duchess of Malfi demonstrates how playwrighting can be seen as an instrument not in the sense of absolutist propaganda but rather in the sense of experiment. Considering the con­temporary definitions for “instrument” (“a device or apparatus for registering, mea­sur­ing, or recording a physical quantity, property, or phenomenon”), “experience” (“tentative procedure; an operation performed in order to ascertain or illustrate some truth; an experiment”), and “experiment” itself (“an action or operation undertaken in order to discover something unknown, to test a hypothesis, or establish or illustrate some known truth”), the play serves as a particularly baroque testing ground for the capacities of developing devices and natu­ral philosophy alike.18 It provides a set of controls (e.g., script) that test variables (e.g., audience) as it mea­sures the effects of technology and the tabular ­orders in a range of situations. Like prior work on the artist’s brush, it might serve as a model for understanding active literary engagement with the sciences of the time.

Wax Meta­phors and the Instruments of Vision Webster’s baroque experimentation can be seen from the most fundamental level of vocabulary to the most conceptual level of philosophy throughout the play. Begin-

W e b s t e r’s B a r o q u e E x p e r i m e n t s

17

ning with the most rudimentary of ele­ments, in a way, the dialogue consistently references con­temporary devices, natu­ral philosophy, and mathe­matics. In relation to technology, the characters utilize words like the following: spectacles, hour-­glass, cupping-­glass, ventage, anvil, forge, hammer, pot-­gun, musket, wire-­drawer, enginous wheels, hinges, clock (2), watch (2), instrument (2), gun-­powder (2), mine (2), cannon (3), compass (3), engine (3), glass-­house (3), bullets (4), pistols (4), and glass (7). In relation to astronomy and mathe­matics, they employ language like the following: circumference, base, pyramid, point, multiply, spheres, halves, lines, mathe­ matics, mathematical, geometrical, geometry (2), perspective (2), eclipse (2), remainder (2), motion (3), divide (4), form (6), shape (6), none (16), and nothing (24). In relation to sensory perception and the sciences more generally speaking, they bring in vocabulary like the following: experiment, almanac, dictionary, hearing, physiognomy, eyelid (2), eye-­sight (2), tune (2), physic (3), examine (3), ears (7), echoes (8), study (10), physician (10), noise (11), hear (22), eyes (25), and see (48). The characters’ interactions are thus laden with the language of scientific knowledge at the time. Such frequencies may demonstrate the s­ imple fact that new technologies w ­ ere becoming a part of everyday life for audiences at the Blackfriars’ Theatre. The dialogue is certainly brimming with references in a range of contexts throughout the play: characters jest that they would like to have a “mathematical instrument” made for a ­woman’s face to keep her from laughing “out of compass”; claim that the Duchess ­w ill marry before the “turning of an hourglass”; and chide servants for their ignorance of math, claiming that the devil likes to “hang at a w ­ oman’s girdle, like a false rusty watch,” so that she cannot “discern how the time passes.”19 Even Galileo’s “fantastic glass” appears in the dialogue with the hope of viewing “another spacious world . . . ​to find a constant w ­ oman ­there.”20 The consistency could indeed mark the growing place of such instruments in con­temporary life. Yet the references begin to reveal something beyond the everyday. Webster does not just employ them in s­ imple figures of speech but often renders them absurd by their own hyperboles. The instruments cannot possibly mea­sure the spatial and temporal ele­ments claimed by the characters: Galileo’s glass cannot extend its view to an otherworldly region of chaste w ­ omen, nor can an hourglass determine time u ­ ntil an unknown marriage, nor can a mathematical device hold a lady’s face in check. The scale is off. The instruments are twisted into the ser­vice of an unsettling control over ­others’ bodies as the playwright aligns much more closely with his own madman than someone invested in the powers of new technology: “If I had my glass h ­ ere,” his character brags, “I would show a sight should make all the ­women ­here call me a mad doctor.”21 Webster’s theatrical lens does potentially show a sight that could make his own audience call him mad. His obsession with hyperboles that delight in their own absurdity reveals a strange testing ground for technology and the language of truth in the day. The characters quickly face unreadable surfaces and even more unreadable depths as the meta­phorical instruments remain useless to understand or alter their bloody fates. Indeed, the dialogue grows increasingly obsessed with the inability to trust one’s eyes, to see below the surfaces of the world, to discern false appearances from true

18

L au r a F r a n c i s

substances—­a ll particularly baroque and scientific concerns of the time.22 Even as advancing technologies allowed natu­ral phi­los­o­phers to observe the smallest and widest of worlds with ever-­refining microscopes and telescopes, their developments produced as many questions as answers. As summarized by Édouard Glissant, the sciences of the 1600s “postulated that real­ity could not be defined on the basis of its appearance, that it was necessary to penetrate into its ‘depths,’ but it also agreed that knowledge of ­t hese was always deferred, that no longer ­were ­t here grounds for claiming to discover the essentials all of a piece.” This led to an age of rational uncertainties and the “very basis of the baroque tendency” that would define ­future worldviews.23 Thus, following Gal and Chen-­Morris’s argument, the strangeness of the baroque becomes a study of orderliness, a genuine investigation of the possibilities brought by the artificial sense organs and the fundamental estrangement from real­ity that came with them.24 Webster’s work toys with not only the unsettling use of devices like “compass” and “glass,” then, but also the bodily instruments they attempt to enhance, like one’s eyes and even the h ­ uman mind itself. The play begins probing nature’s “depths” and the alienation of bodily instruments through the baroque trope of appearances that do not match substances, consistently displaying Glissant’s argument that t­here ­were no longer “grounds for claiming to discover the essentials all of a piece.” When a character asks about the Cardinal, for instance, the Duchess’s husband, Antonio, replies that some flashes of bravery “superficially hang on him for form; but observe his inward character.” He is “nothing but the engendering of toads,” strewing “flatterers, panders, intelligencers, atheists, and a thousand such po­liti­cal monsters” in his way.25 His ­brother, Ferdinand, elicits similar readings: “The Duke ­t here?” Antonio says. “A most perverse and turbulent nature. What­ever seems in him mirth is merely outside.”26 Their appearances clearly do not match their substances, and the characters express their disgust for such disjunctions in terms of monstrosity, loose skin, and slime. Their ­sister does not escape from ­t hese kinds of readings, ­either. Antonio wishes that other ladies would “dress themselves in her.”27 Fer­ dinand asks what “hideous ­t hing” eclipses her virtue.28 The Cardinal complains that she makes “religion her riding hood / To keep her from the sun and tempest.”29 The Duchess’s beauty and holiness thus appear like cloaks or detached skins, and even her pregnancy is represented as a disjunction between her aristocratic exterior and mixed-­class child. While ­these disconcerting lines initially focus on the siblings—­perhaps a commentary on tainted structures of aristocracy—­the ­whole play becomes increasingly consumed by the inability to trust one’s perception of exteriors or to reconcile them with their knowledge of interiors. The Duchess’s servant Cariola exclaims that her innocence ­will be seen on her heart when she is murdered, for example, an anxious assertion that ­others ­will perceive her appearances incorrectly.30 The intelligencer Bosola similarly admonishes his “painted honor” and asks another character, “What t­hing is in this outward form of man / to be beloved?” before deriding humanity’s meaningless repre­sen­ta­tions on earth:

W e b s t e r’s B a r o q u e E x p e r i m e n t s

19

But in our own flesh, though we bear diseases Which have their true names only ta’en from beasts, As the most ulcerous wolf and swinish measle, Though we are eaten up of lice and worms, And though continually we bear about us A rotten and dead body, we delight To hide it in rich tissue: all our fear, Nay all our terror is lest our physician Should put us in the ground, to be made sweet.31

Instead of a ­house for the soul, the body is already “rotten and dead.” It is a senseless artifice to be eaten by bugs, and even its infections’ “true names” are taken from beasts rather than h ­ umans. Ultimately, the “rich tissue” of both dress and flesh is an exterior that ­people wear in order to hide their terror. It is sumptuous, the dialogue relishing in its materiality rather than transcendence or careful observation. When Ferdinand pre­sents the Duchess a wax version of her murdered f­ amily, the inability to trust one’s perception of exteriors or probe interiors is then distorted to baroque extremes. The false substance is so convincing that it overrides both her sensory perception and judgment, and the ambiguous dialogue leaves even spectators to won­der what is real within the play-­world. First, Ferdinand supposedly gives the Duchess her husband’s hand: Ferdinand  It had been well Could you have lived thus always, for indeed You w ­ ere too much i’th’light. But no more; I come to seal my peace with you. ­Here’s a hand Gives her a dead man’s hand. To which you have vowed much love; the ring upon ’t You gave. Duchess  I affectionately kiss it. Ferdinand  Pray, do, and bury the print of it in your heart.32

The Duchess does not balk at the sight of the hand or claim that it is fake. Though the reaction could vary depending on the actor’s choices in gestures, the dialogue suggests that she kisses it in belief. When Ferdinand then asks her to “bury the print of it” in her heart, he is moreover asking her to imprint this repre­sen­ta­tion into her body as if it w ­ ere real: the appearance is fully estranged from the true substance, yet the empty repre­sen­ta­tion is taken for Antonio’s real, fleshy limb. Even accounting for lighting and prop choices, this could also force audience members to use their judgment to override their initial perception and distinguish the real from the false.33 The dilemma only becomes more twisted and complex as the scene develops. When Ferdinand leaves the Duchess with the fake hand, he opens up the curtain

20

L au r a F r a n c i s

to an inner scene as wax and flesh, instrument and body, subject and object, all become almost impossible to distinguish from one another: Ferdinand  Let her have lights enough. [Exit.] Duchess  What witchcraft doth he practice, that he hath left A dead man’s hand ­here? ­Here is discovered, b­ ehind a traverse, the artificial figures of Antonio and his ­Children, appearing as if they ­were dead. Bosola  Look you, ­here’s the piece from which ’twas ta’en. He doth pre­sent you this sad spectacle, That, now you know directly they are dead, Hereafter you may wisely cease to grieve For that which cannot be recoverèd. Duchess ­There is not between heaven and earth one wish I stay for ­a fter this; it wastes me more Than w ­ ere’t my picture, fashioned out of wax, Stuck with a magical needle, and then buried In some foul dunghill; and yond’s an excellent property. For a tyrant, which I would account mercy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Let Heaven a ­little while cease crowning martyrs To punish them! Go, howl them this, and say, I long to bleed: It is some mercy when men kill with speed.34

Only the stage directions let on that the figures of Antonio and his ­children are “artificial,” and the Duchess takes this “sad spectacle” as proof that they are dead and unrecoverable even as she exclaims that it wastes her more than a tortured picture “fashioned out of wax.” For the audience watching the play-­within-­the-­play, Webster does not give any clues about the corpses for almost two pages of dialogue ­either. As scholars have asserted, then, ­these tricks could have easily fooled the perception of original audiences along with the Duchess within the play: while the King’s men might have hired an artist to create a mannequin for the “artificial figures of Antonio and his ­children,” it is likely that the ­actual actors would have played ­t hese dead bodies and therefore confounded the bound­aries between artificial figures and ­actual flesh.35 ­W hether skin or wax, spectators inside and outside the play are thus left suspended in the illusion. When Webster does fi­nally reveal the trick, it comes with Ferdinand’s boast about the success of his experiment: Ferdinand  Excellent, as I would wish; she’s plagued in art: ­ ese pre­sen­ta­tions are but framed in wax Th By the curious master in that quality, Vincentio Lauriola, and she takes them for true substantial bodies.36

W e b s t e r’s B a r o q u e E x p e r i m e n t s

21

His trick is only “framed in wax,” but he delights in how the Duchess takes the horrifying depiction of her dead loved ones to be “true substantial bodies.” He is excited that she is “plagued in art” by the “curious master” who made the spectacle pos­si­ble. The reference to “Vincentio Lauriola” has not been substantiated with any historical connections, but it moreover signals an appreciation for the technical precision of waxwork. Indeed, wax was known for its value across a range of disciplines at the time. As Lynn Maxwell describes in Wax Impression, Figures, and Forms in Early Modern Lit­er­at­ ure, its moist and “palpable” qualities made it an ideal substance for the work of artists, anatomists, and phi­los­o­phers alike. Sculptors used it in order to work out conceptual prob­lems before committing to their final material.37 Paint­ers used it to create “perfectly manipulable subjects” that they could control in ways that ­were simply not pos­si­ble with h ­ uman models.38 Anatomists favored it b ­ ecause of its cleanliness, especially its ability to represent organs such as the kidneys, eyes, and even unborn fetuses persuasively for female viewers without the blood of anatomical demonstrations.39 ­Later, in the 1700s, wax museums would even be supported by the ­f uture pope Prospero Lambertini, while writers used the substance for their own conceptual prob­lems in the form of erasable tablets.40 Phi­los­o­phers like Cicero, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, and ­others similarly favored it in their figurative repre­sen­ta­tions of the mind, sensory perception, and judgment.41 It is this last grouping of natu­ral phi­los­o­phers that most concerns us ­here. The “curious master” in The Duchess of Malfi brings questions of sight and judgment to the forefront as the fall of the curtain on the “sad spectacle” does l­ ittle to mitigate the confusion produced by the artificial figures. When the Duchess asks Cariola how she seems a­ fter the incident, the servant tells her mistress that she looks like a spectacle of appearance rather than substantive flesh: Like to your picture in the gallery: A deal of life in show, but none in practice; Or rather, like some reverend monument Whose ruins are even pitied.42

The Duchess, too, seems to have been inverted by the experiment. Substance has become appearance. Body has become instrument. Subject has become object. As Maxwell argues in her chapter on The Duchess of Malfi, the picture is as much like the w ­ oman as the wax figures are like her ­family.43 The Duchess moreover replies that this inversion is quite proper, for “Fortune seems only to have her eye-­sight / to behold my tragedy.”44 Sight is thus presented as a kind of possession for Fortune. It is an instrument that can do ­little more than observe, that can only look upon tragedy, and even then in a twisted fashion. Though the play certainly deals in ideas of “wax magic” and a picture “fashioned out of wax,” according to Maxwell, I would add that Ferdinand’s illusion makes noteworthy associations with the ideas of sensory perception among natu­ral phi­los­o­phers. Could we not see Webster’s playwriting as an engagement with the sciences as well? Could we not see the wax as a tool in his own kind of baroque thought experiment?

22

L au r a F r a n c i s

When the play is considered in the context of treatises on perception and the body’s sensory instruments, it becomes clear how Webster takes the phi­los­o­phers’ conceptual prob­lems and fashions their ways of seeing the world into his strange puppets. As Gal and Chen-­Morris explain, Aristotle defines “sense” as “what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of ­t hings without the ­matter,” just as a “piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-­ring without the iron or gold.”45 For him, the wax meta­phor emphasizes the direct contact of the object with the sense organ through a medium, reinforcing the unity of the senses and the idea that remote objects of vision are represented as reliably as the immediate objects of touch. According to Jacques Lezra, Re­nais­sance commentators also took up this meta­phor as their model and continued to or­ga­nize concepts of the body and soul through it. When Descartes uses it in the seventeenth ­century, then, it comes as no accident.46 He draws on and departs from a long lineage of wax: “Sense perception occurs in the same way that wax takes an impression from a seal. . . . ​We must think of the external shape of the sentient body as being r­ eally changed by the object in exactly the same way that the shape of the surface of the wax is altered by the seal. . . . ​Thus, in the eye, the first opaque membrane receives the shape impressed upon it by multi-­coloured light.”47 Unlike Aristotle, Descartes de-­ emphasizes what touches the “opaque membrane” ­here. It is not the properties of the vis­i­ble, corporeal body but rather the multicolored light that makes the impression, and the same is true for all the senses.48 Locke would also use wax to describe the ­human sensory system and perception even de­cades ­later: “If the Organs, or Faculties of Perception, like Wax over-­hardned with Cold, w ­ ill not receive the Impression of the Seal, from the usual impulse wont to imprint it; or, like Wax of a temper too soft, w ­ ill not hold it well, when well imprinted; or e­ lse supposing the Wax of a temper fit, but the Seal not applied with a sufficient force, to make a clear Impression: In any of t­ hese cases, the print left by the Seal, w ­ ill be obscure.”49 Again, the contact between “wax” and “seal” is used as an analogy for perception. If the sensory organs are hardened like frozen wax, they “­will not receive the Impression of the Seal, from the usual impulse wont to imprint it”; if they are overly sensitive like warm wax, they “­w ill not hold it well, when well imprinted” e­ ither. When Ferdinand comes to “seal his peace” with the Duchess and lets “her have lights enough,” then, I would argue that the dialogue uses an exaggerated, embodied form of the wax meta­phor that breaks with Aristotle. Webster’s scene displays an inharmonious impression of the per­for­mance on the character’s senses: Fer­ dinand’s figures are real enough to “imprint” on the Duchess’s faculties of perception but, as Descartes ­later asserts, are not exactly a “direct repre­sen­ta­tion” of her ­family e­ ither. The bodily instruments find their limit in the experiment, while the numerous technologies referenced throughout the play provide no assistance. According to the phi­los­o­phers, judgment could provide some hope ­here. Descartes ­later emphasizes the importance of the mind to observe the world around us despite our faulty senses, for example. He first observes the properties of cold wax in his meditations: easy to touch and still fragrant and flavorful with the light taste of honey, in sum, all the properties that “seem to be required for a given body

W e b s t e r’s B a r o q u e E x p e r i m e n t s

23

to be known as distinctly as pos­si­ble.” Yet he also imagines them as they melt away by the fire: all of ­t hose qualities discovered through taste, smell, sight, touch, and hearing have changed. In the midst of such alterations, only judgment can determine that this shifting substance is still wax. The “flavor of its honey,” the “scent of the flowers,” and the “cold” texture evaporate and melt before the senses, but only the intellect can say the “wax remains.”50 Such exercises ultimately lead Descartes to the idea of cogito, even though God alone can provide the ultimate guarantee against uncertainty and even madness. Diverging from this thought experiment, Locke purports that the senses are the primary source of h ­ uman understanding and that other bodies contain essential qualities within themselves.51 Wax does possess inherent characteristics that produce the sensations of color and sound in the sensory organs, operating on them and other bodies just as the sun shines on wax and melts it. ­These operations are moreover what give the ­human mind an “idea” of such “artificial ­things.” Judgment then takes into account the mind’s experience of other shapes to assess this information.52 When the Duchess takes Ferdinand’s “artificial” figures for “true substantial bodies,” I would argue that the play shows how both the senses and judgment can be deceived by the likeness of their qualities to her real c­ hildren. The palpable wax fools the spectators within the play-­world, while the actors’ bodies potentially fool the spectators observing from their places in the crowd outside it. Webster thus displays how the Duchess’s and audience’s prior knowledge of her f­ amily’s shapes informs the judgment of the sensory input, though the erroneous conclusion suggests a skeptical view on the corroboration of evidence. While God might have still provided some certainty in perception and/or judgment for phi­los­o­phers of the 1600s, Webster’s wax offers no such comfort.53 As Rainer Nägele explains in Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity, baroque tragedy is a “radical secularization of the medieval mystery plays that empties out all transcendence and leads t­ oward a cancellation of all transcendence.”54 The body tends to oscillate between “physical entity” and “imaginary subject/object” in this voiding pro­cess, and it ultimately focuses on the sheer corporeality of the body: the drama thus confronts “the audience with the unmeta­phorical interior, literally with the guts and ‘innards’ of the opened body.”55 The exterior is radicalized to the point that the actors are replaced by false puppet figures. The surface, the artifice, the show—­they become indistinguishable from substantive flesh like the instrumentalized, alienated body of the scientific observer, and neither judgment nor perception nor assurance from God can distinguish them. The Duchess of Malfi therefore uses a particularly baroque, particularly skeptical embodiment of the wax meta­phor to experiment with the instruments of the ­human body and their capacity to probe the depths of the world.

Experimental Echoes The sensory dilemmas do not end a­ fter the use of wax or even the Duchess’s death, though, especially for the audience. While Ferdinand’s puppets may disturb

24

L au r a F r a n c i s

observers offstage in act 4, Maxwell remarks that spectators should always know or at least assume that the action is fictional even if they do not understand the exact nature of the puppet. It is a play, a­ fter all. Yet, she asks, do they?56 I would argue that Webster refuses the audience any easy assumptions or m ­ ental distance from the stage as the plot thickens. Beyond the strange implementation of con­temporary devices in the dialogue, beyond the radical embodiment of wax meta­phors in natu­ ral philosophy, the final act reaches out to test the audience through sound. Early on in the play, Ferdinand hopes that his ­sister and her ­family are “burnt in a coal pit with the ventage s­ topped, / that their cursed smoke might not ascend to heaven.”57 Indeed, his wish is granted when her voice remains ­behind ­after he hires Bosola to kill her. When Antonio and Delio enter the stage in the final act, an “Echo from the Duchess’ grave” enters with them: Antonio  And, question-­less, ­here in this open court, Which lies naked to the injuries Of stormy weather, some men lie interred Loved the church so well, and gave so largely to ’t, They thought it should have canopied their bones Till doomsday; but all ­t hings have their end: Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men, Must have like death that we have. Echo  Like death that we have. Delio  Now the echo hath caught you. Antonio  It groaned, methought, and gave A very deadly accent. Echo  Deadly accent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Antonio  ’Tis very like my wife’s voice. Echo  Ay, wife’s voice.58

This is a space bereft of transcendence and substance in true baroque fashion. The court now lies open to the earthly ele­ments, with holy buildings and men exposed to an end that is not the “doomsday” they expected: churches and cities w ­ ill have a senseless and diseased death without redemption, and the remainders of a deteriorated body echo in a “deadly accent” over the graves. The scene also tests the audience’s sense of hearing to determine ­whether this “deadly accent” belongs to Antonio, the Duchess herself, or some other entity. Up to this point, audience members could maintain a privileged perspective over the stage; h ­ ere, however, they are left blind to contemplate the environment before them.59 Unlike the dead hand or wax figures, distanced from the audience, the echoes envelop them in their sound and leave them “plagued in art” as well. The echo should not be passed over as just any instrument of terror, e­ ither. Following Walter Benjamin’s seminal study on baroque tragedy, the antithesis of coherent speech occurs when sound and meaning are brought together but do not form an organic linguistic structure. The echo, for example, repeats the last syllables

W e b s t e r’s B a r o q u e E x p e r i m e n t s

25

of a strophe and thus conforms to the logic of the original line; yet its sounds are detached from the original and can assert their own meanings. In other words, the second half could form a new phrase with new significance. If the word “under­ lying” w ­ ere to echo in a room, for example, the sound might result in something like “under­lying,” “-­lying,” “-­lying,” “-­lying,” and so on. The word for describing a location thus transforms into an indication of dishonesty with the repetition of “lying” over and over again. The Duchess of Malfi’s echoes certainly follow this line of thought. They repeat the logic of Antonio’s sentences (in the structure of “like death that we have,” for instance), but they also become active forces of their own (“the echo hath caught you,” as Delio remarks). Benjamin takes his argument on baroque sound even further than this, though. When speech is re-­echoed from the mouth of the intriguer and “master of meanings,” he argues that it creates a violent distortion that comments on the nature of language itself: “If the echo, the true domain of the ­free play of sound, is now, so to speak, taken over by meaning, then it must prove to be entirely a manifestation of the linguistic, as the age understood it.”60 This is a bold assertion, but the tension between logic and meaning in Webster’s play may indeed speak to the relationship between period and language. In the context of the hyperbolic references to instruments, the failure of both sense and judgment, and the death of the Duchess at the hands of the university-­trained intelligencer Bosola, I suggest that the graveyard echoes express profound skepticism about the viability of a world controlled in any extreme tabular order of t­ hings. The linguistic remainders h ­ ere emphasize the “death” and “deadly” accents reflecting and refracting amid the ruins of the play. I also suggest that the echo “taken over by meaning” reveals an impor­tant aspect of playwriting and of the theater as instrument. The scene stages the echo as part repetition, part agent. Unlike Benjamin’s example, where the intriguer uses the echo to actively toy with his victim, the echo in Webster’s play reverberates from the victim’s grave: Delio  Come, let’s walk farther from ’t I would not have you go to th’ Cardinal’s tonight— Do not. Echo  Do not. Delio  Wisdom doth not more moderate wasting sorrow Than time: take time for ’t—be mindful of thy safety. Echo  Be mindful of thy safety. Antonio  Necessity compels me. Make scrutiny through the passages of your own life; you’ll find it impossible To fly your fate. Echo  Oh, fly your fate! 61

In this case, the echo attempts to advise Antonio. It attempts to avert further bloodshed by emphasizing Delio’s recommendations to “Be mindful of thy safety” and “Oh, fly your fate!” This inversion of Benjamin’s example allows both characters

26

L au r a F r a n c i s

and audiences to re-­inscribe the sound with significance. Unlike the disappearing observer of the new sciences, with their sensory organs alienated from themselves, Webster surrounds his viewers in the sound. The play leaves the freed, fragmented repre­sen­ta­tion for spectators to contemplate and fill, to consider the possibilities and limits of their powers to define as the voices resound through the theater. The script may provide a control for Webster’s experiments, but it leaves the experience of each audience member open as variables to mea­sure. The last lines question ­whether the impression of the per­for­mance ­will take, for instance, emphasizing how the sun “melts both form and ­matter” of the events like the wax of Descartes and Locke: Delio  . . . ​Let us make noble use Of this g­ reat ruin; and join all our force To establish this young hopeful gentleman In ’s ­mother’s right. ­These wretched eminent t­ hings Leave no more fame b ­ ehind ’em, than should one Fall in a frost, and leave his print in snow; As soon as the sun shines, it ever melts, Both form and m ­ atter. I have ever thought Nature doth nothing so ­great for g­ reat men As when she’s pleas’d to make them lords of truth: Integrity of life is fame’s best friend, Which nobly, beyond death, s­ hall crown the end.62

The urge to make “noble use of this ­great ruin” could be seen as an ironic comment on the play’s vio­lence, considering that the impression of the bloody events might not easily dis­appear to make room for the “integrity of life.” It might also ironically question ­whether Nature truly “doth nothing so ­great for ­great men / as when she’s pleas’d to make them lords of truth.” The rest of the play offers embodiments that probe the trustworthiness of h ­ uman senses and judgment and potentially critiques any extreme shift t­oward the tabular o ­ rders that crown h ­ umans as the “lords of truth” by rendering them as absurd as the hyperbolic references to their instruments. Rather than crown any one master of nature, the play leaves audience members—­however faulty their judgment or senses—to remold the repre­ sen­ta­tions with their own interpretations ­after the final lines melt away. One can only hope, perhaps, that integrity and humility ­will be humanity’s “friend” as the world advances beyond the play’s end.

Conclusion When considered in the context of con­temporary sciences, The Duchess of Malfi pre­sents not only an awareness of technology and natu­ral philosophy but also an active response to them on vari­ous levels. Its dialogues brim with references to technology; its wax embodies the meta­phors of natu­ral philosophy to test the bodily instruments of perception and judgment; and its echoes test the audience’s ability

W e b s t e r’s B a r o q u e E x p e r i m e n t s

27

to distinguish the artificial from the real, demonstrating how the theater can become an instrument registering the changing ­orders of the world as the playwright experiments with subject and object alike. In sum, like the visual arts of the time, the play puts vari­ous ways of seeing and understanding the world on baroque display for its spectators to judge. Webster was not alone in such an endeavor, ­either. We might see other writers of the early 1600s as commentators on natu­ral philosophy, their meta­phors not just sensible tools for reading the world around them but active distortions, questions, and contributions to their scientific contemporaries. The uses of hyperbole in John Donne’s Anniversaries could be seen as stretching the limits of anatomy’s potential to produce truth; the constant “nothings” of Shakespeare’s King Lear could be seen as testing the power of mathe­matics to know what it means to have and be “zero”; the profusions of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy could be seen as pushing the limits and possibilities of encyclopedic knowledge. When taken as a case study, Webster’s play shows that such tendencies w ­ ere not just defiant remainders of a fading worldview. The work models a literary engagement with the ­sciences from the inception of long-­eighteenth-­century thought, and ­future scholarship might consider how other writers w ­ ere shaping the technological and epistemological shifts of their time along with natu­ral phi­los­o­phers in an even more actively collaborative sense.

notes 1.  Deborah Harkness, “ ‘Strange’ Ideas and ‘En­glish’ Knowledge: Natu­ral Science Exchange in Elizabethan London,” in Merchants & Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Eu­rope, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 138–141; Adam Max Cohen, Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 4–5, 31. 2.  Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Re­nais­sance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London: Routledge, 2007), 5. 3. Cohen, Shakespeare and Technology, 31. 4.  Harkness, “ ‘Strange’ Ideas and ‘En­g lish’ Knowledge,” 138; Cohen, Shakespeare and Technology, 19–31. 5.  Michel Foucault, The Order of the Th ­ ings: An Archeology of the H ­ uman Sciences, trans. anonymous (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 20–25, 74. 6.  Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-­Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985) offers perhaps the most famous contribution to the history of intersections between the epistemic dilemmas of natu­ral philosophy and early modern technology, as well as Shapin’s own The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 7.  Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-­Morris, Baroque Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 7–8. 8.  Wendy Beth Hyman, “ ‘Deductions from Meta­phors’: Figurative Truth, Poetical Language, and Early Modern Science,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Lit­er­a­ture and Science, ed. Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 31–32. Even so, t­ hose who argued most strongly for plain speech often used figurative language when it suited their purposes. Francis Bacon, Thomas Sprat, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke all employ such speech in their treatises on natu­ral philosophy, descriptions of the Royal Society, and explanations of experimental devices alongside their professed distaste for such ornament. See, for example, their arguments against rhetorical flourish: Francis Bacon, The

28

L au r a F r a n c i s

New Organon, trans. and ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 41–42; Thomas Sprat, “History of the Royal Society,” in En­glish Science, Bacon to Newton, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 162; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 36; John Locke, An Essay Concerning H ­ uman Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 508. Scholars therefore debate ­whether their complaints are directed at figurative language itself or the heavy use of Latinisms by contemporaries, as explained in Ann Blair, “Natu­ral Philosophy and the ‘New Science,’ ” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 453. 9.  Gal and Chen-­Morris, Baroque Science, 11. 10.  Ibid., 2–6. 11.  Alina Alexandra Payne, introduction to Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Eu­rope, ed. Alina Alexandra Payne (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 5; Susan Dackerman, introduction to Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Eu­rope, ed. Susan Dackerman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2018), 19–20. 12.  Payne, introduction to Vision and Its Instruments, 3. 13. Cohen, Shakespeare and Technology, 13–14, 16–17; Adam Max Cohen, Technology and the Early Modern Self (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 13. 14. Cohen, Shakespeare and Technology, 4; Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 10–12, 14–16. The disciplinary bound­aries between the arts and sciences that are so common in t­ oday’s world did not exist in the same way for John Webster’s contemporaries. As Cohen summarizes, scholars “have convincingly shown that the proto-­scientific theory and practice often referred to in the period as natu­ral philosophy was closely intertwined with humanistic study. While a significant gap may exist t­ oday between the humanities and the sciences, no such disciplinary gap existed during the early modern period” (Shakespeare and Technology, 4). 15.  For recent scholarship that explores the possibility of viewing early modern En­glish literary works in a more active relation with the scientific prob­lems of their day, see Jenny C. Mann, The ­Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2021); Jenny C. Mann and Debapriya Sarkar, eds., “Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms,” special issue, Philological Quarterly 98, no.  1–2 (Winter/ Spring 2019); Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Lit­er­a­ture and Science (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Carla Mazzio, “The Invisible Ele­ment in Art: Dürer, Shakespeare, Donne,” in Payne, Vision and Its Instruments, 138–166. 16.  For work on the relationship between anatomy theaters and drama, see Christian M. Billing, Masculinity, Corporality and the En­glish Stage, 1580–1635 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008); Hillary M. Nunn, Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005); and Penelope Meyers Usher, “ ‘I Do Understand Your Inside’: The Animal beneath the Skin in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi,” Medieval and Re­nais­sance Drama in E ­ ngland 30 (2017): 105–125. Other scientific attention tends to focus on the occult arts and cases of lycanthropy, such as Lynn Maxwell, “Wax Magic and The Duchess of Malfi,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2014): 31–54; Mary Floyd-­Wilson, Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 2013); and Ellen Tullo, “Duke Ferdinand: Patient or Possessed? The Reflection of Con­temporary Medical Discourse in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi,” Medical Humanities 36, no. 1 (2010): 19–22. 17.  For such interpretations, see Michelle M. Dowd, “Delinquent Pedigrees: Revision, Lineage, and Spatial Rhe­toric in The Duchess of Malfi,” En­glish Literary Re­nais­sance 39, no. 3 (2009): 499–526; Ariane M. Balizet, “ ‘Drowned in Blood’: Honor, Bloodline, and Domestic Ideology in The Duchess of Malfi and El Médico De Su Honra,” Comparative Lit­er­a­ture Studies 49, no. 1 (2012): 23–49; and Andrea Henderson, “Death on the Stage, Death of the Stage: The Antitheatricality of The Duchess of Malfi,” Theatre Journal 42, no. 2 (1990): 194–207.

W e b s t e r’s B a r o q u e E x p e r i m e n t s

29

18.  OED Online, s.vv. “instrument,” “experience,” “experiment” (Oxford: Oxford University Press), https://­w ww​.­oed​.­com. 19.  John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Michael Neill (New York: Norton, 2015), 15, 22, 37. 20.  Ibid., 42. 21.  Ibid., 81. 22.  While scholars do not typically view En­glish lit­er­a­ture in terms of the baroque, Webster’s play has been studied through its aesthetics. For established connections between Webster and the baroque, see Ralph Berry, The Art of John Webster (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). For relevant themes such as obsessions with refracted views, appearances that do match substances, and an unrelenting sense of mutability in the world, as well as their connections to specific technologies, see José Antonio Maravall, La cultural del barroco: Análisis de una estructura histórica (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1975), 396; Christine Buci-­Glucksmann, The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetics, trans. Dorothy Z. Baker (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013), 8–10; Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 16–19; and Enrique García Santo-­Tomás, La musa refractada: Literatura y óptica en la España del Barroco (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2014), 44. 23.  Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 79. 24.  Gal and Chen-­Morris, Baroque Science, 11. 25. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 16. 26.  Ibid., 17. 27.  Ibid., 18. 28.  Ibid., 54. 29.  Ibid., 65. 30.  Ibid., 56. 31.  Ibid., 61, 31–32. 32.  Ibid., 74. 33. R.  B. Graves, “ ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ at the Globe and Blackfriars,” Re­nais­sance Drama, n.s., no. 9 (1978): 196–197. 34. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 76. 35.  Margaret E. Owens, “John Webster, Tussaud Laureate: The Waxworks in ‘The Duchess of Malfi,’ ” ELH 79, no. 4 (2012): 861–862. 36. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 77. 37.  Lynn Maxwell, Wax Impressions, Figures, and Forms in Early Modern Lit­er­a­ture: Wax Works (New York: Springer, 2019), 14–16, 134. 38.  Ibid., 2. 39.  Lucia Dacome, “­Women, Wax and Anatomy in the ‘­Century of Th ­ ings,’ ” Re­nais­sance Studies 21, no. 4 (2007): 526, 528. 40.  Lucia Dacome, Malleable Anatomies: Models, Makers, and Material Culture in Eighteenth-­ Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 3; Maxwell, Wax Impression, Figures, and Forms, 10–13. 41. Maxwell, Wax Impression, Figures, and Forms, 17–23. 42. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 79. 43. Maxwell, Wax Impression, Figures, and Forms, 142. 44. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 79. 45.  Quoted in Gal and Chen-­Morris, Baroque Science, 44. 46. Jacques Lezra, Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Eu­rope (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 103–105. 47.  Quoted in Gal and Chen-­Morris, Baroque Science, 43. 48.  Ibid., 44. 49. Locke, An Essay Concerning ­Human Understanding, 363–364. 50.  René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Se­lections from the Objections and Replies, trans. Michael Moriarty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22–23. 51. Locke, An Essay Concerning ­Human Understanding, 140–141, 117.

30

L au r a F r a n c i s

52.  Vili Lähteenmäki, “Locke and Active Perception,” in Active Perception in the History of Philosophy: From Plato to Modern Philosophy, ed. José Filipe Silva and Mikko Yrjönsuuri (New York: Springer, 2014), 234. 53.  Jeffrey D. Burson and Anton M. Matytsin, introduction to The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason, ed. Jeffrey D. Burson and Anton M. Matytsin (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 2. 54.  Rainer Nägele, Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 9. 55.  Ibid., 6, 13. 56. Maxwell, Wax Impressions, Figures, and Forms, 145. 57. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 47. 58.  Ibid., 106–107. 59. Susan Anderson, Echo and Meaning on Early Modern En­glish Stages (New York: ­Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 101. While Anderson primarily writes on the (dis)connections between Neoplatonism and sound, her description of the graveyard scene further underlines its interpretive instability for my analy­sis: “The play’s frequent invocation of meaningful and nonsensical types of sound demonstrates the difficulty of distinguishing between them, establishing the possibility that the kinds of meaning we find in what we hear may, in fact, be our own inventions and misapprehensions. A listener’s dilemma, then, is to determine which sounds to pay attention to, and how to interpret them, often without sufficient contextual clues to make a confident judgement” (ibid.). 60.  Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (Brooklyn, NY: Radical Thinkers, 2009), 209–210. 61. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 107. 62.  Ibid., 115.

chapter 2

•

Telling Time in the Fiction of Mary Hearne and Daniel Defoe Erik L. Johnson

In late seventeenth-­and early eighteenth-­century Eu­rope, and especially in E ­ ngland ­after 1680, rapid advances in timekeeping technology leant support to con­temporary philosophies that treated time as a form of material extension analogous to extension in space. John Locke made the comparison explic­itly in An Essay Concerning ­Human Understanding, introducing duration as “another sort of Distance, or Length, the Idea whereof we get not from the permanent parts of Space, but from the fleeting and perpetually perishing parts of Succession.” In Locke’s account, our abstract ideas of time and eternity, to say nothing of such mea­sure­ments of duration as hours, days, and years, derive from reflection on the succession of perceptions in our own minds. By taking the direct experience of distinct, successive perceptions as the root origin of all our ideas about time, Locke accomplishes two ­t hings crucial to his larger epistemological proj­ect: (1) he equates time to physical motion and to change, treating it as essentially progressive in nature; and (2) he deprivileges the idea of eternity, treating it as a mode of time and a logical corollary of progressive extension (generated by adding “lengths of Duration to one another . . . ​in infinitum”) instead of as a concept or experience of time that is somehow essentially dif­fer­ent.1 Like the isochronous “Tick, Tick, Tick” that had, Stuart Sherman writes, become a familiar means of describing the sound of a clock or watch in En­glish by 1680, the Lockean view of time as based in succession is, if not exactly quantitative, fundamentally durational.2 One can extend a count of minutes or a chain of ideas backward or forward—­but in whichever direction one looks, new technologies and the empirical philosophy developing contemporaneously offer no escape from the pre­sent. The attention that early eighteenth-­century British authors of imaginative lit­ er­a­ture paid to how their characters experience and rec­ord the passage of time both reflects this intellectual and technological milieu and registers a ­great deal of uncertainty about it. Locke suggests, continuing his analogy of duration to spatial expansion, that by mapping our individual experiences in time and in place we 31

32

Er ik L. Johnson

can establish “known settled points” without which “all t­ hings would lie jumbled in an incurable confusion.”3 Yet in early eighteenth-­century narrative, “insistence on the time pro­cess,” a trait that Ian Watt sees as characteristic of a new, emerging novel form, does not always produce such reassuring results.4 A watch may stop, changing a life forever; a makeshift calendar may omit entire days, throwing all the dates based on it into question. ­These events occur in fictions published in 1718 and 1719, pivotal early years in Watt’s account in The Rise of the Novel, by the little-­ studied (and possibly fictitious) epistolary novelist Mary Hearne and by her con­ temporary Daniel Defoe. The detail of the temporal accountings that t­ hese two authors put on display does not so much establish order as reveal its fragility. Read against self-­consciously modern early eighteenth-­century dramas, like William Congreve’s The Way of the World, that embrace a Lockean understanding of time as subjectively experienced but retrospectively universalizable, the fictions of Hearne and of Defoe show a deep suspicion of the modern, technologically mediated experience of time. In fact, considering Hearne’s and Defoe’s fictions in tandem suggests that many early eighteenth-­century experiments in fictional narration pose philosophical challenges to Locke, defending an older, Augustinian understanding of time that centered on a felt dichotomy between the pre­sent and the eternal.

When and Where: Extension and the Materialization of Time The technological culture of the early eigh­teenth ­century heavi­ly favored analogies of time and space in Britain, since much of the energy of its ongoing horological revolution stemmed from the drive to develop a clock so reliable that it would be able to tell you not only when but where you ­were—by keeping time invariably enough to calculate the longitude at sea. By the seventeenth c­ entury, sailors could determine their latitude by observing the vertical position of astronomical reference points (such as the North Star in the Northern Hemi­sphere or the sun in the Southern Hemi­sphere). The earth’s rotation makes calculating longitude a ­great deal more complicated, since objects in the sky appear to move horizontally even when one remains still. To adjust for this, one has to know how the local time differs from the time at the prime meridian—or one can try to estimate position based on the ship’s speed and course.5 Errors could have costs in lives and in trea­sure, and the steady toll of such disasters eventually led to government intervention.6 Noting that theoretically promising means of mea­sur­ing longitude remained imperfect “partly for want of money for ­trials and experiments,” Parliament created through the Longitude Act of 1714 a Board of Longitude empowered to award the inventor or perfector of any such device or method with substantial sums—up to £20,000 for determination of longitude accurate to a half degree or thirty miles.7 Though the clockmaker John Harrison would not develop a marine chronometer that met the Board of Longitude’s standards ­u ntil the 1760s, Isaac Newton’s testimony to Parliament in support of the act made clear that “a Watch to keep Time exactly,” one unaffected “by the Motion of a Ship, the Variation of

Telling Time in Hear ne a nd Defoe

33

Heat and Cold, Wet and Dry, and the difference of Gravity,” had moved from the realm of fantasy to that of theoretical technological possibility.8 The Longitude Act both emerged from and encouraged an understanding of time as a pure experience of technological mediation, a universalizable and homogeneous mathematical form not ­shaped by particularities of person or place. The horological revolution that had begun in Eu­rope in the late seventeenth c­ entury focused on changes to two components of early modern mechanical clocks: the regulator, which kept time by dividing it into intervals, and the escapement, the mechanism through which the regulator moved the hands to indicate the time. In 1656, the Dutch mathematician Christian Huygens had raised the bar for accuracy in standing clocks by replacing the friction-­prone foliot (rod) and balance wheel regulators of existing designs with pendulums. Though Galileo had previously suggested this idea, Huygens made it ­simple enough in the implementation that clockmakers both enthusiastically a­ dopted the design for new clocks and retrofitted existing domestic timepieces en masse. In 1675, though t­here are sharper arguments about priority in this case, Huygens unveiled a parallel regulatory improvement for watches, the hairspring or spiral balance spring, which could release force from a weight a l­ittle bit at a time in regular intervals with far less variability than watch-­sized versions of the pendulum.9 At a stroke, or so the standard story goes, the best portable timepieces went from routinely gaining or losing fifteen to thirty minutes in the course of a day to general accuracy within five minutes ­u nder ordinary conditions on land. The innovations that catapulted ­England to “unchallenged preeminence” in clockmaking and watchmaking by 1680 ­were, however, more than refinements of Huygens’s designs.10 If Huygens broke time down into finer grains—­creating a chronometry in which, as Sherman argues, taking evidence from such inherently time-­bound “diurnal forms” as diaries and periodical essays, the minute displaced the hour as the principal unit of time in much lived experience—­British craftsmen made improvements that concealed and therefore naturalized the mechanism of clocks, weakening any links between clock time and natu­ral diurnal rhythm.11 Focusing much attention on the escapement, En­glish clockmakers produced two new designs that greatly reduced internal wear and tear: the anchor escapement in the late seventeenth c­ entury (with Joseph Knibb, Robert Hooke, and William Clement as competing claimants) and the deadbeat escapement (by George Graham) in the early eigh­teenth. The Worshipful Com­pany of Clockmakers, concerned about petitions for exclusivity of an early longitude projector, issued multiple broadsides in the 1710s popularizing the accomplishments of their member craftsmen, who, they boasted, “have Improved Watches . . . ​from being wound up e­ very Twelve, to go Twenty four Hours, and now to a Week” and clocks “to go with a Pendulum Four Hundred Days, without once winding up.”12 For watches, the British developed the repeater, a feature that sounded out the current time, usually to the quarter hour, at the press of a button, which greatly enhanced the usefulness of portable timepieces at night. The repeater further abstracted clock time by removing it from any necessary association with the face of the clock.13

34

Er ik L. Johnson

The new chapter “Of Identity and Diversity” that Locke added to the second edition of the Essay in 1694 outlined a vision of personal identity that further extends his treatment of time as pure duration. Locke’s principal concern in this section is probative—he aims to establish a logical foundation on which persons can be held accountable for their actions. It is to that end that he insists that personal identity consists in “identity of consciousness,” for “to punish Socrates waking, for what sleeping Socrates thought, and waking Socrates was never conscious of, would be no more of Right, than to punish one Twin for what his Brother-­Twin did, whereof he knew nothing.”14 On the one hand, Locke engages in bold thought experiments in this section that seem to allow for highly psychologized experiences of time, asking, for instance, w ­ hether an individual can have dif­fer­ent sleeping and waking personalities that constitute dif­fer­ent persons and imagining that a consciousness might be transferred from one body to another. The Lockean notion of personal identity, however, is not so much psychological or even individual as it is durational. This identity consists, in the first place, of a succession of perceptions and, in the second, of the consciousness that arises from reflection on them. Duration provides both the impetus for that consciousness and its content. This definition of personal identity does not allow for any essential difference between subjects that would cause them to experience identical streams of perceptions differently. Given con­temporary neoclassical interest in using tightened unities of time to create heightened unities of action, it is not too surprising that the British stage at the turn of the eigh­teenth ­century would provide case studies illustrating that Huygensian chronometry and the Lockean conception of personal identity fit together, as both take temporal succession to be the fundamental organ­izing princi­ ple of experience. Perhaps inspired by the con­temporary technological landscape, plays by Peter Motteux, John Dennis, William Congreve, and ­others following the Glorious Revolution tightened traditional versions of the unity of time by advertising that the time of their plotted action matched the time of per­for­mance perfectly, sometimes even including clocks or references to clock time to highlight the modernity of such simultaneity effects.15 Congreve’s The Way of the World demonstrates especially well the broad mapping functions that precision timekeeping can serve. The play gradually reveals varied and apparently conflicting commitments to be part of one harmonious design, once set in their proper chronological order. From its first scene, Congreve’s comedy identifies the passage of time as a crucial thematic concern. In it, Mirabell asks a server for the time, receives the response, “Turn’d of the last Canonical Hour, sir,” then (according to the stage direction) “Looking on his Watch,” finds a more specific answer, exclaiming, “Ha? Almost one a Clock!”16 The juxtaposition signals that Congreve’s tightly plotted play ­will unfold according to two parallel but harmonized views of time. One model is traditional, bound to ritual and occasion, and intrinsic to the action; it is evoked h ­ ere by the canonical hour, a pertinent reference b ­ ecause it signals that marriage schemes are afoot. The second, recorded by Mirabell’s watch, is objective, mathematically precise, and allegedly impersonal—an indication that experience is mediated and, if not naturally well ordered, at least so orderable. ­These correspond roughly to plot

Telling Time in Hear ne a nd Defoe

35

and per­for­mance time, and Congreve keeps them closely synchronized, observing, in the words of Henry Home, Lord Kames, “a stricter unity of time during the w ­ hole play, than is necessary.”17 Keeping the w ­ hole to the space of a few hours in the after­noon, Congreve allows for plausible intervals between characters’ exits and re-­entrances, suitable for the business they state they w ­ ill or have performed. More broadly, he illustrates the reach of durational thinking in a clockwork age. The denouement of The Way of the World hinges on a new version of an old trope, the revelation of a secret identity, which we might in this case describe as delineated rather than revealed. Mirabell ultimately secures his marriage to the heiress Millamant and thwarts the villain Fainall’s blackmail scheme by disclosing a financial agreement he made with Fainall’s wife. Mrs. Fainall, whom we already know to be Mirabell’s confidante, secretly put her estate in trust to Mirabell ­after the death of her first husband. The scene in which Mirabell produces the deed of trust explaining this recalls familiar tropes of recognition that hinge on the discovery of a previously unknown blood relationship between characters. Mirabell asks Fainall to read the inscription on the deed aloud—­“A Deed of Conveyance of the w ­ hole Estate real of Arabella Languish, ­Widow, in Trust to Edward Mirabell.”18 We do learn a new name—­her first one—­and are able to identify the play’s secondary heroine, with uncommon specificity for an eighteenth-­century stage character, as Arabella Wishfort Languish Fainall. We already knew about each item in this j­umble of identities. Arabella has more vis­i­ble ties by blood and marriage than any other character onstage: she is Lady Wishfort’s d ­ aughter, w ­ idow of a man named Languish, wife of the villain, and the hero’s former lover. But now we can order t­ hese allegiances with precision. Drawn before Mrs. Fainall became Mrs. Fainall, the deed of conveyance establishes that her confederacy with Mirabell predates her marriage to Fainall and thus invalidates Fainall’s claims to her estate. Against the background of the still-­recent Glorious Revolution, The Way of the World resonates with an emerging Whig historiography in which forward pro­ gress becomes pos­si­ble if we accept a view of ­human roles and commitments as durational rather than essential in nature.

Mary Hearne and the Limits of Temporal Accounting In the first two de­cades of the eigh­teenth ­century, the increasing availability of clocks and watches made them prominent features of both Britain’s material culture and its affective landscape. The French traveler Henri Misson had written in 1698 that London was a city characterized not so much by “horloges” (clocks) as by “horlogerie” (clockmaking), an art “en si grande vogue, que tout le monde a des montres, & qu’il y a de grandes pendules dans la plûpart des familles” (in such ­great vogue that every­body has watches, and that ­t here are pendulum clocks in most ­house­holds).19 Looking beyond the capital, the historians Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift find evidence of steadily expanding owner­ship of timepieces at all levels of wealth during the first four de­cades of the eigh­teenth ­century in probate inventories from Bristol, noting that by about 1720, “even the poorest group of inventories

36

Er ik L. Johnson

include some men with clocks or watches.”20 From the late seventeenth c­ entury, clock-­based mea­sure­ments appear with increasing frequency in surviving domestic documents such as r­ ecipes; in both published and manuscript r­ ecipe collections from 1675 to 1700, Glennie and Thrift report that instructions with specified intervals based on quarter, half, and w ­ hole hours (and sometimes intervals as precise as “half a quarter of an hour”) steadily eclipse the early modern practice of using “task-­based” instructions, such as saying a set number of Ave Marias, in order to time ­recipe steps.21 New models of repeating watches continued to appear; most sounded hours and quarters, but by 1710, half-­quarter and five-­minute repeaters ­were also available. A surviving George Graham quarter repeater dating from 1719– 1720 boasts a special feature, a “pulse piece” that, when pressed, ­causes the watch to vibrate, rather than ring out, the hour and quarter, allowing its user to check time discreetly.22 With the spread of chronometric consciousness into the domestic sphere, we should not be surprised to find that a timepiece and complicated affective responses to Huygensian timekeeping figure prominently in at least one amatory fiction, the first of two remarkable interconnected epistolary novels published in 1718 and attributed to a Mary Hearne, about whom l­ittle is known. Hearne, referred to as “Mrs. Hearne” in publishers’ cata­logs, “M.H.” in the signed dedications to her fictions, and “Mary Hearne” in Edmund Curll’s A Compleat Key to the Dunciad, was ­either a ­woman writer or Curll’s conception of what a ­woman writer should be. Her first novel, The Lover’s Week; or, The Six Days Adventures of Philander and Amaryllis, is dedicated to Delarivier Manley; its male lead shares his name with the hero of Aphra Behn’s Love-­Letters between a Nobleman and His S­ ister and at one point has “the famous Mrs. Behn’s Novels” on his t­ able.23 The Lover’s Week and its direct sequel, The Female Deserters, are, in a sense, inherently critical of modern chronometric consciousness in that both follow characters’ movement from highly scheduled urban life to pastoral retreat. Amit Yahav has recently argued that ele­ments of romance (certainly a label that could fit Hearne’s fiction) provide forms of re­sis­tance to and negotiation with Huygensian chronometry that eighteenth-­ century sentimental fiction ultimately reconstitutes into a new “sensibility chronotope.”24 The Lover’s Week, however, provides more than a momentary escape from chronometric consciousness. By documenting a temporally regimented existence and then dramatizing its breakdown, Hearne’s first novel raises po­liti­cal and philosophical questions about the entire enterprise of accounting for an individual life as a series of discrete successive moments. As an epistolary fiction that consists of one long letter subdivided into six journal-­like “days,” The Lover’s Week bears more than a few superficial similarities to Sherman’s diurnal form; its narrator, Amaryllis, at first seems to provide “a continuous self-­construction, a ­r unning report on identities both shifting and fixed,” within the bounds of a “serial and closely calibrated temporality.”25 She writes to a confidante to explain her absence from London, and the status of the daily letters—­whether she writes them at once retrospectively or incorporates prewritten material—­remains unclear. But they generally follow an orderly diaristic

Telling Time in Hear ne a nd Defoe

37

form as though written a day at a time; they begin with Amaryllis rising and taking tea or breakfast around nine or ten, relate a series of engagements, and conclude with her retiring to bed around midnight. She vouches for the schedule by letting us know that she carries a timepiece and consults it frequently, remarking at vari­ous points that she took leave of her aunt “between five and six,” that her maid “had not been gone out of my Chamber ten minutes by my watch, before she return’d,” and that Philander was “the only Man that ever had obtain’d a quarter of an Hour’s Discourse with me in private” (100, 101, 104). As the last remark indicates, such a thorough accounting of Amaryllis’s whereabouts and activities serves to safeguard her reputation and her economic prospects; she resides with a single aunt who holds out hope that Amaryllis w ­ ill marry an aristocratic suitor. She is also, apparently, correct to be vigilant, b ­ ecause when Philander seduces her, he does it by interfering with her ability to keep track of time. In the third and by far the longest of The Lover’s Week’s daily chapters, authors and characters alike chafe against timekeeping technology. Philander plans to invite Amaryllis in the eve­ning and detain her through a series of excuses u ­ ntil it is too late to return home; he lays the ground, simply enough, by winding his own timepiece back, the better to mislead her. Hearne is concerned enough about plausibility that she offers multiple explanations for why this lie works, and as a result, the slippages of time that her heroine experiences are narratively overdetermined. Amaryllis notes, “looking on my own Watch, I found it did not go, though by what Accident it stop’d, I c­ an’t tell”—an “Accident” that remains unexplained. She also writes, in an aside that may have sufficed alone, “Time you know passes away quick in Com­pany one likes, which I must own to you, I did that of Philander’s” (106). In the aftermath, the heroine comes dislodged not once but twice from the socially acceptable chronometric grid that has or­ga­nized her days. With the time past one, she accedes to Philander’s argument that staying the night would be more prudent than returning home at an hour apt to attract scandal. The next day, this scenario recurs. Philander slips into her bedchamber in the night, and, though w ­ hether he does more than lie aside her sleeping form remains unclear, Amaryllis’s rest is disordered enough that she does not take her morning tea on the fourth day u ­ ntil two in the after­noon, when “at so late an Hour, it was impossible for me to think of returning home” (112). With noise of her disappearance having begun to spread, she throws herself into well-­ordered preparations for an elopement with Philander, as that now seems the most practicable course of action. Amaryllis’s s­ topped watch neatly represents the paradox at the center of Hearne’s fiction, which depends on its heroine’s fine-­g rained consciousness of time as it passes but elides, at its climax, any clear moment of decision or consent. The paradox is all the more striking ­because this elision is not ­either transcendent or tragic. At the end of The Lover’s Week, Amaryllis describes her new life, lodged as Philander’s mistress at his country retreat, as a happy one, preferable to any she could have enjoyed with the suitor her aunt preferred, but it is not a life outside of or above time. In fact, following the temporally distended events of the third night and fourth morning, she both recalibrates her narrative chronometry, settling back

38

Er ik L. Johnson

into a pattern of morning-­to-­midnight activity, and renews her participation in the comfortable material culture that her timepiece represents. She spends the fifth day in engagements with her “Milliner, Mercer, and Mantua-­Maker” before moving and is pleased to learn that her new abode is “a quarter of an Hour’s driving” from a market town (118–119). Instead of staging a s­ imple contrast between diurnal form and timeless pastoral, The Lover’s Week reveals the limitations of considering personal identity as the product of temporal succession by providing a thorough, moment-­by-­moment account of a pivotal week in its heroine’s life that serves only to indicate her lack of awareness and agency in the events that change her circumstances most materially. By including a story that forms a dark parallel to Amaryllis’s own in The Female Deserters, the direct sequel to The Lover’s Week, Hearne shows even more pointedly that a chain of successive, discrete, and more or less isochronous moments cannot capture the essential nature of female experience, so much of which is, in the eigh­teenth ­century, both passive and epochal, divided into chapters by life events, such as marriage, over which an individual may have ­little control. The Female Deserters conducts another experiment in epistolary form as, in a second long letter to her confidante, Amaryllis first continues her own story and then transcribes, in a nested, Chinese-­box structure, the first-­person amatory narratives of two new neighbors, her fellows in a small society united by experience of amorous “Circumstances” that have displaced them from the urban social grid (132). To a modern reader, one of t­ hese narratives, Calista’s, may seem to be only Amaryllis’s with the euphemisms removed.26 She now lives as the mistress to a suitor who abducted her, drugged her, and went to bed with her in an unconscious state, leaving her with few socially ­v iable options. Calista apologizes for the “Melancholy” tone of her story, but neither Hearne nor Amaryllis offers moral reflections on it, instead closing with emphasis on the “Rural Delights” that the ­women now enjoy (182–183). The “sleeping Drops” that override Calista’s volition, however, serve a similar function, in her narrative, to the combination of deliberately altered and fatefully s­ topped watches in The Lover’s Week (178). Put in the most general terms, ­t hese potent objects indicate how often events or conditions that the individual does not experience consciously nevertheless become principal determinants of personal identity.

Daniel Defoe and the Analogical Pre­sent When Locke describes the ideas of duration, time, and eternity as ones we could arrive at through “­t hose Sources of all our Knowledge, viz. Sensation and Reflection . . . ​as clear and distinct as many other,” he dismisses as mystification a tradition of Christian thought based on the binary of temporal and eternal. Locke takes specific aim at St. Augustine, quoting a remark from book 11 of the Confessions (“the more I set myself to think of [time], the less I understand it”) in order to contradict it by showing that duration and its modes are not so “abstruse in their nature.” According to Locke, eternity is a mode of time, and we conceptualize it

Telling Time in Hear ne a nd Defoe

39

through the pro­cess of extension: “The Mind having got the Idea of any Length of Duration, can double, multiply, and enlarge it, not only beyond its own, but beyond the existence of all corporeal Beings.”27 According to Augustine, the idea of eternity arrived at through extension is false: “a long time . . . ​consisting of many passing shifts” differs qualitatively from eternity, in which “nothing passes, but every­t hing is in the pre­sent.” Among the three parts of time recognized in ­human language (past, pre­sent, and ­f uture), Augustine affords a special status to the pre­ sent. Though the pre­sent is always in the pro­cess of passing into nonbeing, he writes, it is only in the pre­sent and in eternity that “being” is pos­si­ble.28 Though eternity is remote from h ­ uman experience, we can conceptualize it, however imperfectly, through analogy with the pre­sent. Defoe’s fiction shows ­great sensitivity to the power of such analogical thinking about time. In A Journal of the Plague Year, set in 1665 and published in 1722, Defoe seems careful only to name London sites and streets that existed in both 1665 and 1720; in The Fortunate Mistress, popularly known as Roxana, he interweaves dates that place the action in the reign of George I with cameo appearances by figures of the Restoration (the banker Robert Clayton, the Duke of Monmouth, and, more ambiguously, a royal figure who may be Charles II).29 In both cases, he emphasizes parallelisms between the historical experience of his characters and of his readers, offering us a vision of a narrator’s essentially dif­fer­ent pre­sent to which we can compare and contrast our own. If the reader of A Journal of the Plague Year can dimly envision the streetscape described when a desperate escapee from quarantine runs from one still-­extant tavern to another (the Angel Inn, the White Horse, and the Pyed Bull), H.F.’s reflections on mortality and ­human nature become all the more resonant.30 On the other hand, when Defoe drops the line “Written in the Year 1683” at the conclusion of Moll Flanders or when, following the dream-­ like masquerade in which the heroine of Roxana receives her sobriquet, she pauses her own narrative to report that it w ­ ill resume ­after a three-­year hiatus (a private retreat, possibly with the unidentified king, that she is not at liberty to discuss), he uses chronological distance as a marker of difference, indicating that his characters’ subjectivities may be comparable to, but are not continuous with, our own.31 Just as Hearne, writing in and about the domestic milieu in 1718, had developed a narrative that both depended on and critiqued modern chronometric consciousness as manifested in the improvement and spread of clocks and watches, so Defoe, in his landmark 1719 fiction The Life & Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, developed a narrative that both drew on and qualified the durational model of experience at the heart of Locke’s secular empirical philosophy. Defoe’s fiction does evince the deep interest that Watt attributed to it in creating “a sense of personal identity subsisting through duration and yet being changed by the flow of experience.”32 At the same time, Defoe’s heroes have radically idiosyncratic subjectivities, and his use of fictional chronologies that are familiar in their outlines but at best weakly correspondent to the world outside the text are a common means of signaling that idiosyncrasy. Defoe, it seems, intuitively grasped one of the major lacunae in Locke’s thought—­namely, just how it

40

Er ik L. Johnson

is, if all knowledge derives from individual experiences of sensation and reflection, that individual knowledge becomes communal.33 One answer to the prob­lem is Christian or Platonic—­collecting and comparing experiences may allow us to perceive pieces of pre-­existing truths whose veracity is ­either apparent or becomes so through their congruence.34 Defoe’s fiction posits, as an enabling condition of this approach, an Augustinian understanding of the pre­sent, as an unquantifiable, ineffable experience of time through which the individual can apprehend the eternal, but only by means of analogy. We might read Robinson Crusoe as, in part, a religiously informed revision of Lockean philosophy. If Defoe reimagines the Garden of Eden through the lens of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government when he describes Crusoe’s cultivation of his island, he comes similarly close to the language of An Essay Concerning H ­ uman Understanding when he describes Crusoe’s experience of time.35 The dated journal of his first year on the island that Crusoe reproduces early in the narrative constitutes a remarkable formal innovation on Defoe’s part—­“the first time,” Sherman notes, “a faux diary forms part of a larger fiction.”36 Its entries are also not chronologically reliable. Their dates presumably derive from the calendar that Crusoe tells us he began to keep by cutting notches on a post “about Ten or Twelve Days” ­after the shipwreck; the imprecision of that interval is curiously at odds with the fact that the calendar begins counting from the day of the wreck, September 30, 1659. One of the journal entries raises further questions about Crusoe’s own count of days, for it includes a “Note,” prob­ably a retrospective addition: “I soon neglected my keeping Sundays, for omitting my Mark for them on my Post.”37 The most obtrusive indication that Crusoe’s calendar is out of joint, however, comes in a dramatic incident that seemingly recapitulates one of the few biblical allusions to appear in Locke’s Essay. Illness and spiritual conversion dominate the late-­June and early-­July entries of Crusoe’s journal, when the complementary promptings of reason and conscience drive the fever-­w racked Crusoe to peruse one of the Bibles that survived the wreck and—­something that, he writes, “I never had done in all my Life”—to kneel and pray. With this act and a quaff of rum, he sinks into oblivion, sleeping into the next after­noon and, perhaps, he speculates, even longer: “Nay, to this Hour, I’m partly of the Opinion, that I slept all the next Day and Night, and ’till almost Three that Day ­a fter; for other­w ise I knew not how I should lose a Day out of my Reckoning in the Days of the Week, as it appear’d some Years ­a fter I had done. . . . ​But certainly I lost a Day in my Accompt, and never knew which Way” (1:108–109). This aside is one of several remarks in Crusoe’s journal that only make sense if read as retrospective editorial insertions, though they are not distinguished typographically from what Crusoe calls the “Copy” of his journal (1:79). It also resembles Locke’s conjectural account of the original ­human experience of duration. As further support for the dependence of our mea­sures of duration on conscious experience, Locke notes that, though we generally have ­little difficulty retrospectively figuring intervals lost to sleep into our daily accounts of time, “if Adam and Eve (when they ­were alone in the World) instead

Telling Time in Hear ne a nd Defoe

41

of their ordinary Nights Sleep, had passed the ­whole 24 hours in one continued Sleep, the Duration of that 24 hours had been irrecoverably lost to them, and been for ever left out of their Account of time.”38 ­W hether or not the echo is intentional, it demonstrates how Defoe’s self-­sufficient fictional chronologies might act as a qualification to the Lockean view of duration. Crusoe on his island repeats what Locke considers to be a presocial experience of time, hardly isochronous and subject to gaps and distortions, of the sort that figure in the Essay mainly by way of thought experiment. Notwithstanding this apparent interpolation, Crusoe’s journal immediately proceeds to give dates a­ fter his fever breaks without offering any indication that they have been adjusted for publication; “I had no Fit the next Day,” Crusoe writes, “this was the 29th” (1:109). Defoe’s aim is not integration or harmonization. Coupled with the dated entries that ensue, the deictic “to this Hour” in the aside about the missing day, though it does signal some continuity with the past, also lets us know that multiple pre­sents are si­mul­ta­neously at play. Instead of taking ­these pre­ sents as successive, or even as organizable in a successive arrangement, Defoe pre­ sents conflicting narrative forms—­t he journal composed close to the action and the memoir composed long a­ fter—as parallel, warning us when first presenting the interpolated journal that it w ­ ill repeat many “Particulars over again” (1:79). The effect is that time, for Defoe, is ineffable, or at least immaterial; duration is not a stable material substratum, equivalent to space, on which events can be plotted and or­ga­nized without contradiction. Rather, Defoe urges an Augustinian qualification of the Lockean understanding of personal identity as ­shaped through the passage of time, implying that, while two bodies may not be able to occupy the same space, the same moment can easily include two (or more) pre­sents. The moment we begin to think about the pre­sent, Augustine warned, it had already slipped into the past—­but our apprehension of this very fleetingness means that we accept the relativity and boundedness of our own pre­sent(s).

Conclusion In dif­fer­ent ways, the fictions of Hearne and Defoe resist and qualify prevalent technologically based understandings of time as an idea derived from and subordinate to the ­simple experience of duration. By demonstrating how mastery of clock time fails to produce agency for a female protagonist, Hearne suggests that essentially dif­fer­ent subjects may have essentially dif­fer­ent experiences of time. Defoe makes a more extreme version of this case, focusing on subjects whose experiences of time are variously idiosyncratic. In d ­ oing so, he urges us to reconsider Locke’s durational idea of personal identity, again implying that essential differences between subjects pre-­exist and, to some degree shape, the subject’s experience of duration. In the face of a homogenizing secular understanding of time that proj­ ects the pre­sent backward into the past and forward into the ­f uture, the fictions of Hearne and Defoe recall Augustine’s belief that our pre­sent, and all pre­sents, must be highly contingent, as they are but slivers of the eternal. Th ­ ese fictions suggest

42

Er ik L. Johnson

how older, spiritual understandings of time, if preserved by the novel, may continue to support critical comparative thinking about the pre­sent.

notes I am grateful to Kit Kincade, the Defoe Society, and the American Society for Eighteenth-­ Century Studies for a valuable chance to pre­sent about the fiction of Mary Hearne. Blair Hoxby generously provided temporary access to his office and personal library while this work was in pro­gress. 1.  John Locke, An Essay Concerning H ­ uman Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 181–183, 193. In this re­spect, Lewis White Beck contrasts Locke to Isaac Newton, who posited eternity to be a sort of substratum for mea­sur­able time, “the infinite mathematical time that was before the world and w ­ ill last a­ fter the world is destroyed.” Beck, “World Enough, and Time,” in Probability, Time, and Space in Eighteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Paula Backscheider (New York: AMS Press, 1979), 117. 2.  Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and En­glish Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1–2, 5–6. 3. Locke, An Essay Concerning ­Human Understanding, 199. 4.  Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 22. 5.  Without mechanical timepieces up to that task, sailors gauged horizontal distance using manual aids such as marine sandglasses in combination with their estimates of a vessel’s speed and course, a procedure known in En­glish as “dead reckoning.” The earliest reference to “dead reckoning” quoted in the Oxford En­glish Dictionary, a seventeenth-­century treatise on the virtues of the magnetic compass, contrasts a “dead reckoning” to the “true” one that a compass made pos­si­ble in the calculation of latitude. Mark Ridley, A Short Treatise of Magneticall Bodies and Motions (London: Nicholas Okes, 1613), 147. In a short penultimate chapter on longitude, Ridley admits that “although . . . ​Magneticall ­needles . . . ​do not shew the longitude, . . . ​­there is much helpe brought thereby for [its] knowledge” (149). 6.  The Scilly naval disaster of 1707, in which navigational error led to the loss of Admiral Clowdisley Shovel’s flagship the Association, three other vessels, and almost two thousand British sailors, including Shovel himself, became an inciting incident for passage of the act. The Scilly wreck provides a dramatic opening for Dava Sobel’s popu­lar history Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Prob­lem of His Time (New York: Walker, 1995), 11–14, though in fact it is not clear that miscalculation of longitude caused the tragedy, as Derek Howse notes in his authoritative Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 45–47. 7. ­Great Britain, An Act for Providing a Publick Reward for Such Person or Persons as ­Shall Discover the Longitude at Sea (London: John Baskett, assigns of Thomas Newcomb, and Henry Hills, 1714). National longitude prizes had been offered before, notably by Philip II of Spain in 1567 (and again by his son Philip III in 1598), but Britain’s rapid rise to pre-­ eminence in clockmaking and watchmaking in the late seventeenth c­ entury fostered new hopes of success. 8.  House of Commons Journal, June 11, 1714, quoted in Howse, Greenwich Time, 51. 9.  David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 127–128, on the pendulum clock; 136–138, on the balance spring and on the competing claims of Huygens and Robert Hooke. Cultural and religious networks contributed to the rapid spread of new practices across Protestant countries, particularly benefiting E ­ ngland, the republic of Geneva, and the Netherlands. Ahasuerus Fromanteel, a Dutch émigré to London and the first clockmaker to advertise pendulum clocks in E ­ ngland, in 1658, had, for instance, managed to apprentice his son John Fromanteel to Huygens’s clockmaking partner in the Netherlands, Salomon Coster, in 1657, a year before Huygens’s book about the pendulum regulator, Horologium oscillatorium, had even appeared in print. Clare Vincent and Jan Hendrik Leopold, Eu­ro­pean Clocks and Watches in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Highlights of the Collection (New York: Metro-

Telling Time in Hear ne a nd Defoe

43

politan Museum of Art, 2015), 86, 88 (item 17). France, which at first profited from Huygens’s residence in Paris from 1665 to 1681, lost significant ground a­ fter Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 led to mass emigration by Protestant craftsmen. Roland Racevskis, Time and Ways of Knowing u ­ nder Louis XIV: Molière, Sévigné, Lafayette (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 40–41. 10.  The assertion is quoted from Carlo  M. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture, 1300–1700 (New York: Walker and Com­pany, 1967), 69. 11. Sherman, Telling Time, 88–91. 12. See Worshipful Com­pany of Clockmakers, Reasons Humbly Offered . . . ​against the Bill, Entituled, a Bill for Securing to Mr. John Hutchinson the Property of a Movement In­ven­ted by Him for the More Exact Mea­sur­ing of Time (London, 1712). See also Worshipful Com­pany of Clockmakers, The Clockmakers’ Farther Reasons against Mr. Hutchinson’s Bill and Printed Reasons (London, 1712). 13.  Throughout the late seventeenth and early eigh­teenth centuries, the backup sundials that ­were once a common feature of watchcases and against which watch time could be checked steadily dis­appeared. Racevskis, Time and Ways of Knowing, 39. By 1731, the situation had so far reversed that an anonymous pamphlet discussed how difficult the reliability of watches made it to determine true solar time. “Twenty-­four Hours of a good Watch are always exactly of the same Length; but Twenty-­four Hours of the Sun are not exactly so,” the author warns. He produces a t­ able advising exactly how many minutes and seconds to wind a well-­running watch back or forward to achieve a mea­sure of solar time that reflects the differing lengths of days—­thirteen minutes and twenty-­two seconds forward from sundial time as index, for instance, to make up for the shortness of the day on January 16. An Explanation of the Nature of Equation of Time, and Use of the Equation ­Table for Adjusting Clocks and Watches to the Motion of the Sun (London: F. Clay, 1731), 5, appendix. 14. Locke, An Essay Concerning ­Human Understanding, 342. 15.  Examples include Congreve’s plays, John Dennis’s A Plot, and No Plot (1697), and Peter Motteux’s Beauty in Distress (1698), The ­Temple of Love (1706), and Love’s Triumph (1708). Showy observance of “perfect” unities of time became common enough that George Farquhar complained about them in A Discourse upon Comedy, in The Works of George Farquhar, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 2:270; and John Gay and Alexander Pope satirized them in Three Hours ­after Marriage (1717), in John Gay: Dramatic Works, edited by John Fuller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 207–263. 16.  William Congreve, The Way of the World, in The Works of William Congreve, ed. D. F. Mc­Ken­zie, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2:107–108. 17.  Henry Home, Lord Kames, The Ele­ments of Criticism, 6th ed., ed. Peter Jones, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 2:429. 18. Congreve, The Way of the World, 2:221. 19.  Henri Misson, Memoires et observations faites par un voyageur en Angleterre (The Hague: Henri van Bulderen, 1698), 239; translations mine. 20.  Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in ­England and Wales, 1300–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 125. To the extent they can determine it, Glennie and Thrift assert that this pattern holds for E ­ ngland as a w ­ hole, with the diffusion of clocks and watches “relatively rapid compared with many consumer goods, especially given their relatively high cost” (163–164). They also note that the emphasis that most horological studies have placed on privately owned clocks and watches neglects the improvement of public clocks, in par­tic­u­lar the addition of clocks to civic buildings and to poorer parishes. Existing historical lit­er­a­ture, they contend, with its emphasis on the private, potentially idiosyncratic experience of time, “chronically underestimates the temporal competencies of eighteenth-­century p ­ eople and environments” (116). 21.  Ibid., 223–224. 22.  Vincent and Leopold, Eu­ro­pean Clocks and Watches, 156 (item 33). 23.  Page citations for Hearne’s novels, ­here and in subsequent in-­text parentheses, are to the edited texts in Joan Rose Reteshka, “An Edition of Mrs. Hearne’s ‘The Lover’s Week’ and ‘The Female Deserters’ ” (PhD diss., Duquesne University, 1998). ­These heavy-­handed nods to

44

Er ik L. Johnson

popu­lar authors and the rather mechanical plug for her two novels in A Compleat Key have led some critics to suggest that Hearne was an invention of Curll’s. The distinctiveness and unity of her two novels and the fact that t­ here are only two lead me to believe that she existed, though “Mary Hearne” may of course be a pseudonym. The Lover’s Week, published in 1718 by E. Curll and R. Francklin, appeared in a second stand-­a lone edition within six months of publication and in 1724 was serialized in The Original London Post. Robert Adams Day, in Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction before Richardson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), labeled it “one of the most . . . ​significant pieces of En­glish fiction produced before 1740” (177). Her second fiction, The Female Deserters, appeared in November 1718 u ­ nder the imprint of J. Roberts and was published in a combined edition with The Lover’s Week ­under the title Honour the Victory and Love the Prize in 1721. For more on publication history and authorship, see esp. Paul Baines and Pat Rogers, Edmund Curll, Bookseller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 120, 342n29; Robert Ignatius Letellier, The En­glish Novel, 1700–1740: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 484; Kathryn  R. King, “The Novel before Novels (with a Glance at Mary Hearne’s Fables of Desertion),” in Eighteenth-­Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms, Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter, ed. Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 36–57; and Reteshka, “An Edition,” 4. 24.  Amit S. Yahav, Feeling Time: Duration, the Novel, and Eighteenth-­Century Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 9, 14. Yahav argues that the sensibility chronotope renders duration qualitative through the incorporation of “off-­t he-­clock” breaks into novelistic narrative. 25. Sherman, Telling Time, 8–9. 26.  Hans Turley, in “The Anomalous Fiction of Mary Hearne,” Studies in the Novel 30, no. 2 (1998): 146, for instance, argues for a moralistic reading of Hearne’s fictions and insists that the second novel, as well as “the noise of all the other heroines with whom readers are familiar,” effectively undermines the happy ending of the first. Reteshka, in “An Edition,” discusses Hearne among other precursors to Samuel Richardson in an appendix on “the drugged rape scenario” (195–198). 27. Locke, An Essay Concerning ­Human Understanding, 181, 197. The parenthetical reference to Augustine is quoted from Locke. 28. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Carolyn J. B. Hammond, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library 26–27 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014–2016), 2:211–213, 2:217–219. 29.  Paul K. Alkon, Defoe and Fictional Time (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979), 49–50, 52–54. Manuel Schonhorn identifies and dates ninety topographical references in “Defoe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’: Topography and Intention,” Review of En­glish Studies, n.s., 19 (1968): 387–402, duly credited in Alkon, Defoe and Fictional Time, 49n33. Alkon frames A Journal of the Plague Year and Roxana as complementary rather than contrasting examples of Defoe’s attitude t­ oward fictional time and anachronism. By mentioning only buildings that existed in both 1665 and 1720, A Journal of the Plague Year avoids anachronism in a technical sense but in ­actual effect blurs distinctions between pre­sent and past. On dates and historical figures in Roxana, see esp. David Blewett, “The Double Time-­Scheme of Roxana: Further Evidence,” Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture 13 (1984): 19–28; Judith Sloman, “The Time Scheme of Defoe’s Roxana,” En­glish Studies in Canada 5, no. 4 (1979): 406–419; and Rodney M. Baine, “Roxana’s Georgian Setting,” SEL 15, no. 3 (1975): 461–464. 30.  Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (New York: Norton, 1992), 61. 31.  Daniel Defoe, The Fortunate Mistress; or, a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Ma­de­moi­selle de Beleau . . . ​Being the Person Known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of King Charles II, 2 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell / Shakespeare Head Press, 1927), 1:212. 32. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 24. 33.  Nancy Armstrong, in “The Other Side of Modern Individualism: Locke and Defoe,” in Individualism: The Cultural Logic of Modernity, ed. Zubin Meer (Lanham, MD: Lexington

Telling Time in Hear ne a nd Defoe

45

Books, 2011), 111–119, puts the prob­lem in po­liti­cal terms, noting that “Enlightenment intellectuals found it notoriously difficult to explain how Locke’s individual could join with ­others to form a cohesive community” (112), but it is no less an epistemic one. Amit Yahav, in “Time, Duration, and Defoe’s Novels,” Partial Answers: Journal of Lit­er­a­ture and the History of Ideas 6, no. 1 (2008): 33–56, points out that Berkeley’s treatment of ideas (including ideas of time) as mind-­dependent and Leibniz’s insistence that only a robust a priori framework of logical and mathematical concepts allows us to generalize from our observations and experiences are both impor­tant counterpoints to “the ease by which [Locke] moves from individual experience to objective mea­sure” (37). 34.  This is the journalistic proj­ect that Defoe lays out in the first issue of his periodical A Review of the Affairs of France (no. 1, February 19, 1704), in which he promises not so much reportage as “needful Rectifications” by comparing reports and, “both Sides being Examin’d, the Particulars referr’d to the general Opinion of all Men.” Religious faith supports Defoe’s belief that comparative reading w ­ ill lead to discovery and that the quest for truth w ­ ill have an endpoint. He describes his hoped-­for results in strongly Miltonic language, pledging, “Nor ­shall we Embroil our selves with Parties, but pursue the Truth; find her out, when a Crowd of Lyes and Nonsence has almost smother’d her, and set her up, so as she may be both seen and heard.” Daniel Defoe, A Review of the Affairs of France, ed. John McVeagh, 9 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), 1:7–8. Cf. Milton’s Eikonoklastes: “It s­ hall be ventur’d yet, and the truth not smother’d, but sent abroad, in the native confidence of her single self, . . . ​to finde out her own readers.” In Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes, vol. 3 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 339. 35.  Rebecca Bullard, “Politics, History, and the Robinson Crusoe Story,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Robinson Crusoe,” ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 89–92, details parallels between passages in Crusoe and Locke’s Second Treatise. 36. Sherman, Telling Time, 226. 37.  Daniel Defoe, The Life & Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, 3 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell / Shakespeare Head Press, 1927), 1:72, 82. Subsequent parenthetical references in the text are to this edition. 38. Locke, An Essay Concerning ­Human Understanding, 183.

chapter 3

•

The Technology and Theatricality of Three Hours ­after Marriage’s “Touch-­Stone of Virginity” Thomas A. Oldham

Within a few weeks of the 1717 premiere of John Gay, Alexander Pope, and John Arbuthnot’s Three Hours a­ fter Marriage, a response appeared in print. Written by “E. Parker, Philomath,” the Complete KEY features, among its many observations, this striking critique: “Lubomirski’s Liquor for the Tryal of Virginity. Is an Incident stole out of an old Play, Printed in 1653. (somewhat applicable to t­ hese Scribblers) call’d, ‘The Changeling, a Tragedy. Written by Thomas Middleton, assisted by Mr. Rowley.’ ”1 Parker noticed that the Scriblerians had written a scene remarkably like one that had graced London’s stage nearly a ­century ­earlier. Licensed for per­ for­mance in 1622, The Changeling features Beatrice-­Joanna, a w ­ oman given a concoction by her husband to test her virginity. Having studied how to pass the test (by yawning, sneezing, and laughing), Beatrice fools Alsemero into thinking she is chaste, which the audience knows is false. Hers is merely a simulacrum of virginity, ultimately exposed by the series of events leading to her tragic death. Three Hours ­after Marriage, however, takes this scene and renders it comic. Susanna Townley, drinking a similar potion, fails to faint, sneeze, or produce a large red spot of infamy on her cheek—­a ll telltale signs of a deflowered w ­ oman. Again, dramatic irony informs the audience that she is no virgin. The pseudoscientific stunt was a sham all along: Susanna’s lovers duped her husband, an ostensibly learned doctor, with their test. What was once tragic now provokes laughter. While The Changeling’s easily falsified chastity may strike some as comic, the play’s macabre vio­lence is serious.2 This virginity test should be taken seriously as well, as it proves accurate for the truly virginal Diaphanta and is “very much in touch with tradition but modified to be stageworthy.”3 The play’s scientific and technological context was one in which alchemy had not fully surrendered to the scientific method, with Alsemero’s work related to both the historical genre of the Re­nais­sance closet4 and the writings of Antonius Mizaldus, sixteenth-­century 46

“ T o u c h - ­S t o n e o f V i r g i n i t y ”

47

astrologer and doctor.5 The virginity test does not appear in Mizaldus’s De Arcanis Naturae (the book mentioned in the play), but t­ here are such tests in his Centuriae IX. Memorabilium, continuing a centuries-­long tradition.6 Supposed signs of virginity traditionally included blood at first intercourse, tightness/constriction of the vagina/cervix/uterus, distinct volume/odor/sound of urine, a propensity to urinate a­ fter consuming vari­ous compounds, the shape of the breasts, and vari­ ous changes in complexion. Many texts caution that t­ hese signs can be falsified, and some even provide instructions on how to do precisely that.7 Lest one think that such ideas would have been laughable by 1622, Johann Jacob Wecker perpetuated several techniques of urinalysis as late as 1660.8 The period also saw a number of attempts to establish virginity via physical examination, although despite a proliferation of anatomical texts, understanding of the hymen was decidedly uncertain.9 Of special interest to historians is the case of Frances Howard, whose divorce from the Earl of Essex centered on his impotence and her claims to virginity, allegedly proved by physical examination. This has direct textual ties to The Changeling.10 Between The Changeling and Three Hours ­after Marriage ­were ninety-­five years of intellectual and technological advances that accompanied the height of the scientific revolution and the beginning of the Enlightenment, including new medical technologies and wider dissemination of anatomical knowledge. This recontextualization of the falsified, pseudoscientific virginity test from a Jacobean tragedy to a Scriblerian satire represents changing attitudes ­toward science and the female body. With its satirical treatment of husband and wife, Three Hours a­ fter Marriage si­mul­ta­neously considers and undercuts advances in medical science, technology, and w ­ omen’s agency. The seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries have long held significance for historians of sex and gender. Thomas Laqueur, in his landmark Making Sex, pinpoints this era as key to the transition from the one-­sex to the two-­sex model.11 While this interpretive timeline has been critiqued by Karen Harvey, it remains highly influential.12 Sweeping assessments from Laquer and Michel Foucault have fundamentally altered the way historians understand the period, but perhaps more useful to understanding the individual body is the work of Mary E. Fissell, whose focus on En­glish vernacular texts is “more par­tic­u ­lar, and in this case a smaller canvas is a messier canvas.”13 Fissell identifies small ways in which the Reformation, the Civil War, and the Restoration affected the narratives surrounding the female body. Many of ­these changes ­were textual: “In the midst of ‘a world turned upside down,’ some writers turned to the ­human body itself as a pos­si­ble producer of stable truths.”14 The downside to this was the possibility that texts could “propose that ­women ­were inherently inferior to men, implying that sexual subjugation was grounded in natu­ral fact.”15 En­glish vernacular texts approached sex and generation with the conventions of vari­ous categories: midwifery texts, natu­ral histories, and books of won­ders.16 All of t­ hese genres addressed virginity in significant ways, but with no consensus. Combined with the apparent objectivity of detailed descriptions and technologically

48

Thom as A. Oldha m

sophisticated engravings, this ambiguity renders virginity a site of contestation. Texts like Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia (1615), which Kassell calls the “first comprehensive En­glish anatomy,”17 is typical in its emphasis on the hymen: “the entrance, the piller, or locke, or flower of virginity. For being w ­ hole it is the onely sure note of unsteyned virginity.”18 This is also true in a practical text like Nicholas Culpeper’s A Directory for Midwives (1651): “four Caruncles or Fleshy Knobs” that are “round in Virgins, but hang flagging when Virginity is lost . . . ​ joyned together by a thin and sinewy skin, or Membrana . . . ​called the Hymen.” This hymen provides “a certain note of Virginity where ever it is found, for the first act of Copulation breaks it.”19 Other books ­were of a decidedly less scientific nature. While the work of Giovanni Sinibaldi (appearing in En­glish in 1658 as Rare Verities: The Cabinet of Venus Unlocked and Her Secrets Laid Open) defines loss of virginity as hymeneal rupture (while also cautioning it may be broken in many ways), it also features sections closer in tone and content to The Changeling.20 Dubious instructions identify “any Signs of corrupted virginity,” including impudence, a forked nose, an elongated neck, the inability to endure the smell of a lily, and attracting bees, while also providing tricks to cause incontinence or ever-­faithful embraces.21 Corinne Harol, in her extensive study of Enlightenment virginity, describes the overall trend as one of empirical epistemology subjecting “the hymen to the same objectification as other body parts, contributing to the demystification of virginity.”22 Many of the examples from the period follow similar patterns. Both Thomas Chamberlayne’s The Compleat Midvvife’s Practice Enlarged (1659) and The Midwives Book (1671) by Jane Sharp (the rare midwife who published herself) are skeptical, providing alternate explanations for a broken hymen.23 While Sharp is celebrated for inverting male-­female rhe­toric and normalizing the female body, the sheer number of male-­authored texts minimizes such an effect.24 Thomas Gibson’s The Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomized (1682) vaguely describes a virgin’s uterus as unique in “substance,” “bigness,” and “cavity.”25 He describes a virgin’s vagina as “so strait,” yet he cautions that the lack of the “signs of Virginity” are not definitive proof that “Virginity is also wanting.”26 The popu­lar, pseudonymous Aristotele’s Master-­Piece (1684) describes the female anatomy as possessing “4 Caruncles, or ­little Buds like Mirtle-­berries, which in Virgins are full and plump,” which are “joyned or held together by l­ittle Membranes.”27 ­These membranes, “being once delacerated, denote devirgination.”28 Robert Barret’s A Companion to Midwives, Child-­Bearing ­Women, and Nurses (1699) claims that this hymeneal tradition is “not to be doubted, we have such ­great Authorities for it,” even though the sign may not be “perfect.”29 William Cowper’s The Anatomy of Humane Bodies (1698) cautions that the hymen appears differently at dif­fer­ent ages and may be broken “in Coitu or other­w ise.”30 Michael Etmullerus’s Etmullerus Abridg’d (1703) describes falsified virginity, “obtain’ed by straitning the Genitals, and retrieving their natu­ ral Tone: which is effected by Baths and Fomentations prepar’d of Astringents” made of vari­ous roots.31 Nicolas Venette’s The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’d (1707) is remarkably forward-­t hinking: “­t here is no certain Sign of a Maidenhead,

“ T o u c h - ­S t o n e o f V i r g i n i t y ”

49

nor of the Ravishment of a Virgin,” and such claims “are for the most part equivocal, and uncertain,” largely based on the per­for­mance of certain attitudes and be­hav­iors.32 One page, l­ ater, however, he provides a r­ ecipe for how “a counterfeited Maidenhead may be discover’d.”33 John Marten’s Gonosologium Novum (1709) reiterates that the hymen is not a reliable indicator of virginity and details a way to deceive husbands by using a fish-­bladder of blood.34 By 1717, the year of Three Hours a­ fter Marriage, Culpeper’s Directory had appeared in several editions. In the first printing, he cautioned that the hymen “may be broken without Copulation, as it may be gnawn asunder by defluxion of sharp humors.”35 The expanded 1716 version equivocates further: the hymen “is not found in all Virgins b ­ ecause some are very lustful, and when it itcheth, they put in their Fin­ger or some other t­ hing and break the Membrane: Sometimes the Midwives break it.”36 Not all virgins w ­ ill bleed on first copulation (as both Moses and “African Custom” hold) for a variety of reasons, including “if the Man’s Yard be small.”37 Despite this relative scientific accuracy, it also utilizes antiquated Galenic, humoral terms.38 Th ­ ese texts share the ambivalent anxiety pre­sent in both The Changeling and the overall “Restoration crisis in paternity.”39 Th ­ ere is certainty and ambiguity; the sources of knowledge are si­mul­ta­neously antiquated and up-­to-­date, direct and indirect. Even Pseudo-­A ristotle, not a soberly scientific writer, attempts to sound definitive, detailing the story of a man tried for rape who was cleared by an examination by a “skillful Chirurgeon and two Midwives,” who concluded that the supposed victim was still a virgin.40 The reference to surgeon and midwife highlights one aspect of the period: “Medical understanding of the body was informed by and enacted through medical practice. The best histories of early modern medicine treat ideas and practices as two sides of the same coin.”41 This had not always been the case; Michael Stolberg examines the “­limited role of physical examination in traditional bedside medicine” for much of the premodern era.42 Consequently, u ­ ntil roughly the eigh­teenth ­century, parturition was solely the realm of the midwife. Male surgeons typically only intervened when complications endangered the ­mother’s life. Not only did midwives help ­women in ­labor; their knowledge of and authority over bodies allowed them to serve myriad functions, from medieval virginity tests to the Frances Howard case.43 The eighteenth-­century physician John Leake acknowledged midwifery as “the Medicina forensis, or that branch of the Science contributing to the public administration of justice, in what relates to virginity, pregnancy, and the natu­ral period of uterine gestation.”44 Delivering babies and assessing virginity dovetailed as midwives ­were charged with ensuring inviolate lines of succession through proper births. Men could gain knowledge from books, but midwives exerted control properly with direct experience and agency in the m ­ atter. This helped create what Adrian Wilson terms “a collective culture of w ­ omen” surrounding childbirth.45 Over time, gender relations changed as the midwife slowly ceded authority to her male counterpart. The reach of t­ hese new man-­midwives, who “made reproductive knowledge available to all,” extended far past the birthing chamber.46

50

Thom as A. Oldha m

Increasingly seen as more objective, rational, and fit, they lectured, published texts, testified as to ­whether criminals ­were pregnant (and thus exempt from execution), and, significantly, established paternity.47 Caroline Bicks notes that the traditional midwife had a profound effect on patriarchal lineage and masculinity, largely b ­ ecause her “potential manipulations of virgins (or of fallen ­women wishing to appear virginal) intersect . . . ​w ith larger issues about the maintenance of clearly defined and recognizable categories by which female bodies might be contained and circulated in the marital marketplace.”48 Man-­midwives now possessed this knowledge of w ­ omen and offspring, ultimately shaping the resulting connections between sex and money. For Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, the economic implications of sex are clear, as it “was inscribed within rules and norms, and it was subject to an exchange economy in which the ultimate regulator was the balance between production and reproduction.”49 Assuring a husband that his wife was sleeping only with him was more knowable—­a nd more impor­tant—­t han ever. For Tassie Gwilliam, “the presence of virginity in eighteenth-­century marketplaces—of texts, marriage, or prostitution”—­means that “counterfeit maidenheads devalue virginity in the same way that fake money devalues coinage.”50 The equivocations pre­ sent in the anatomical lit­er­a­ture, however, belie the false sense of security that scientific knowledge seemed to provide. When the commodification of female sexuality is taken into account, the ambiguous nature of virginity displayed in anatomical texts and midwifery manuals meant that entire economic systems based on patrilineal inheritance w ­ ere at stake: “the virgin anatomy becomes a way of working out power/authority issues between men.”51 While concerns over cuckoldry and bastard c­ hildren had always existed, the man-­midwife and the (male) surgeon seemed to establish greater patriarchal control. This shift was assisted, at least in part, by a new technology, cloaked in secrecy yet exhibited with theatricality: The one ­t hing that Peter [Chamberlen] III had neither delivered nor unfolded was the Secret—­t he secret invention, prob­ably of Peter the Elder, which enabled the Chamberlens to deliver more w ­ omen more effectively than any obstetrician before them. The Chamberlens had always gone to fantastic lengths to keep their secret. They are said to have arrived at the ­house of whichever ­woman it might be in a special carriage. With them was a huge wooden box adorned with gilded carvings. It always took two of them to carry the box and every­one was led to believe that it contained some massive and highly complicated machine. The laboring w ­ oman was blindfolded lest she should see the Secret. Only Chamberlens ­were allowed in the locked lying-in room, from which the terrified relatives heard peculiar noises, ringing bells, and other sinister sounds as the Secret went to work.52

The Chamberlen “Secret” was the obstetric forceps. The development and popularization of the forceps, from roughly the mid-­seventeenth to early nineteenth ­century, marked a change in the practice of childbirth and, consequently, in the relationship of men to w ­ omen’s bodies.53 This anecdote illustrates the difficulty in

“ T o u c h - ­S t o n e o f V i r g i n i t y ”

51

understanding the invention’s history: for at least a c­ entury, the nature of the forceps was a proprietary secret guarded for the sake of the Chamberlen f­ amily’s fame and fortune. The key features of their forceps show the careful innovation incorporated into the design: two separate, fenestrated blades with slight curvature to grasp the head ­gently, but the timeline of ­t hese adaptations, and who developed them, is unclear.54 What is clear is the im­mense benefit gained from the device, and this success led to other boastful theatrics from the Chamberlens, from College of Physicians politics to the doomed pregnancy of a rachitic French “dwarf.”55 By the time Edmund Chapman included a description of similar forceps in 1733’s Essay on the Improvement of Midwifery, many ­people assumed that the heirless Hugh Chamberlen sold the f­ amily secret, though the prototypes w ­ ere not found u ­ ntil 1813, hidden under­neath the floorboards of Peter Chamberlen’s ­house.56 However the Chamberlen secret spread, its impact was extensive. Leake’s 1787 edition of his midwifery book touts its “description of the Author’s new forceps, Illustrated with elegant copper plates” alongside a condescending view of midwifery’s past: “­Women in ­Labor ­were attended by their own sex, who gave their assistance without method, being rather directed by necessity than skill or choice; hence, the pro­gress and improvement of this Art must have been extremely slow.”57 A new age dawned, however, that had profound effects on gender relations. Bettina Wahrig sees the introduction of t­hese “tools of exclusion” as the moment when midwifery became grounded in “a rational and mechanical explanation of life”; without access to the proper educational and financial resources, w ­ omen ­were 58 deemed unfit to h ­ andle t­ hose tools. This forceps-­driven tension between men and ­women in the birthing chamber was commonplace enough to be satirized in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. By the early 1700s, men w ­ ere attending at an increasing number of healthy 59 births. The rise of the man-­midwife was the result of complicated historical forces, po­liti­cal influence, and class dynamics, all aided and abetted by the new technology of the forceps.60 An equally power­f ul instrument for change in gender relations, though, might be per­for­mance itself, as the Chamberlens’ theatricality suggests. Per­for­mance theory has influenced the study of sex and gender for de­cades;61 thus, any difficulty of proving virginity goes beyond the inscrutability of the individual hymen and amplifies the performativity of all w ­ omen. Scholars have used such language to describe The Changeling, saying its virginity is a “re-­enactment, . . . ​ less a state of sexual innocence than a performing art,”62 as well as being “deeply dependent upon the stories ­women told about their sexual status and on how they acted ­t hese stories out.”63 In other words, Beatrice-­Joanna’s and (as we ­shall see) Susanna Townley’s virginity is performative. If virginity is not a physical, bodied state, ­these characters are able to create through words and repeated signs the very t­ hing ­under question. In the case of Three Hours a­ fter Marriage, what could have been a tragedy of virginity becomes farcical; deadly serious, arcane al­ chemical knowledge gives way to a performative scientific parody. Yet this parody is not necessarily progressive or feminist. While the classic line about the phenomenology of the theatre (“in theater ­t here is always a possibility that an act of

52

Thom as A. Oldha m

sexual congress between two so-­called signs ­will produce a real pregnancy”)64 takes on new resonance in this play, feminist theatre scholars argue against any neutrality of this phenomenological power: “Placing ­women in a repre­sen­ta­tion always connotes an under­lying ideology and pre­sents a narrative driven by male desire that effectively denies ­women’s subjectivity. ”65 This parallels Fissell’s analy­sis that Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives “sexualizes the reading pro­cess, implicitly making ­women’s bodies into objects to be consumed by men.”66 Three Hours a­ fter Marriage shows the theatre to be an instrument with precisely ­t hese effects. Known primarily as the play in which rival suitors dress up as a ­mummy and a crocodile, Three Hours ­after Marriage shows the Scriblerians playing virginity anxiety for laughs, discharging their satire on a favorite hobby­horse: the foolish pedant, Dr. Fossile, physician and antiquary, is a stand-in for Dr. John Woodward, physician and antiquary.67 Al Coppola indicates, however, that “it is crucial to recognize that the Fossile of the farce is not r­ eally John Woodward.” The Scriblerians, he argues, overlay aspects of a classic figure of satire, the virtuoso, on top of Woodward, creating a figure “who seems much more at home in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries than in the eigh­teenth ­century.”68 Thus, it is logical that Coppola compares the play to a Jonsonian comedy of humors; it is also appropriate to remember its similarity to the Jacobean The Changeling, as Gay’s aforementioned con­temporary duly recognized.69 The plot is ­simple: Fossile marries a young bride but is disabused of any illusions that she is virginal when he learns that she is already married and the ­mother of a child. Supporting characters include two additional suitors, a mediocre female playwright, and a pompous literary critic. Before the ending revelations, Fossile administers the virginity test to Susanna at the height of his obsession with her chastity. Whereas The Changeling’s Beatrice-­Joanna counterfeits the indicators of true virginity, Susanna does not need to dissemble, not b ­ ecause she is pure but ­because the test is pure hokum. Fossile is fooled into believing the scientific-­ sounding Lapis Lydius Virginitatis (Touchstone of Virginity) by a disguised rival. Fossile believes, but the audience is in on the joke. A c­ entury of scientific advancement rendered what had once been a tragic scene satirical. Beneath the humor, however, lies the truth of science-­enabled male hegemony: Fossile’s pseudoscientific credulity may be an object of ridicule, but Susanna reveals the debasement of female agency. A knowing bawdiness is part of the play’s appeal: Susanna furtively entertains her paramours Plotwell and Underplot via a series of farcical events, including a suggestive scene in which Plotwell hides u ­ nder her petticoat. Calhoun Winton argues that the double entendres, obscenity, and profaneness ­were of concern to Richard Steele, controller of Drury Lane’s Patent.70 Anne Oldfield’s per­for­mance as Susanna, along with her female form, came a­ fter only a few generations of actresses in the history of the En­glish stage. A mere nineteen years ­after Jeremy Collier’s A Short View on the Immorality and Profaneness of the En­glish Stage and twenty years before the Licensing Act of 1737, Three Hours ­after Marriage displayed plenty of vice on the stage, alongside Gay’s par­tic­u­lar style of Augustan ridicule.

“ T o u c h - ­S t o n e o f V i r g i n i t y ”

53

Moreover, the play’s moment in the history of medical technology informs its attitude t­ oward sex. The role of the male surgeon, with forceps in hand, in childbirth increased, as did his power over the female anatomy. The e­ arlier anx­i­eties eased as the new technology facilitated greater control of the female body. As Lisa Forman Cody remarks, “Reproduction intrigued the eighteenth-­century public in ways not seen in the seventeenth c­ entury, and in so ­doing became an area of knowledge available to all, attainable through ‘rational-­critical’ means rather than personal bodily experience.”71 The obvious irony is that Doctor Fossile is ignorant of con­ temporary advancements; he is thus unable to assess his own conjugal status. Three hours into his marriage, he foolishly and ignorantly tests his wife’s virginity. He does not know her in the biblical sense but tries to know her with his mind; he fails. As Katherine Mannheimer shows, Fossile’s testing of his wife fits into a larger pattern, his obsession with textuality: “Fossile longs for a stably physical sign by which to know of a momentary event (‘defloration’) or even attitude (‘lewdness,’ or, ­later, ‘shame’ 2.470)—to convert ­these ephemeral comportments into stable textual emblems.”72 His fundamental nature is one of “sterility and petrification, . . . ​ fossilization.”73 Coppola’s conclusion is that Fossile is not an eighteenth-­century man; he is an old-­fashioned Galenic, concerned with humoral compatibility in his and Susanna’s procreative potential.74 This knowledge may be specious, but it is deployed to control Susanna nonetheless: whereas The Changeling’s treatment of ­women was violent, in Three Hours it is mercenary. An additional example of this is Fossile’s niece Phoebe Clinket, an unsuccessful playwright and the other figure of virginal obsession. A ­ fter several scandalous allusions to her “child,” she clarifies that she is referring to her writing. As Susan Gubar points out, the Augustan satirist maligned female writers “as failures b ­ ecause they cannot transcend their bodily limitations; they cannot conceive of themselves in any but reproductive terms.”75 That Clinket’s offspring is merely intellectual and her motherhood mere affectation is yet one more joke on the subject at hand; her body, as well as Susanna’s, exists solely in patriarchal structures. Shortly before Fossile administers the elixir to his wife, his actions repeatedly contribute to her commodification. He instructs his servant that both Susanna and “her Trunks and Boxes be immediately brought hither,” intertwining her fate with that of her possessions in an almost metonymic relationship.76 Next, he dwells on the anxious life that a cuckold is doomed to lead: “Ah Fossile! if the Cares of two Hours of a married Life have so reduc’d thee, how long can’st thou hold out! To watch a Wife all Day, and have her wake thee all Night! Twill never do.”77 Time is counted out and assessed. Wasted time is an undue burden on the obligatorily watchful husband. The commodification does not cease ­a fter Susanna has been cleared of unchastity by the dubious touchstone. Fossile absurdly invents a long-­ standing ­family tradition for the test: “­These Drops have been a Secret in our ­Family for many Years. They are call’d the Touch-­stone of Virginity. The Males administer it to the Brides on their Wedding-­Day; and by its Virtue have ascertain’d the Honour of the Fossiles from Generation to Generation. ­There are ­Family Customs, which it is almost impious to neglect. . . . ​My ­Mother obliged me to this Experiment

54

Thom as A. Oldha m

with her d ­ ying Words.”78 Fossile’s embellishments reveal the importance of the female body: verification of chastity, passed down through the generations, would create a patriarchal pattern of owner­ship like any deed or legacy. This is not the end of Fossile’s scheming, though. Immediately ­after he is satisfied with Susanna’s virginity, he expands his plot: “And to preserve her so, ’tis necessary that I have none but chaste Servants about her. I’ll make the Experiment on all my Female Domesticks.” This, addressed as an aside, provides the dramatic irony as he tells Susanna aloud, “I ­w ill now, my Dear, in thy Presence, put all my ­Family to the Trial. H ­ ere! bid my Niece, and all the Maid-­Servants come before me.”79 The commodification of the female body extends to the lower-­class servants around them. Naturally, the maidservants refuse to implicate themselves: they offer a variety of excuses and flee. The lone ­woman who takes the drink is Clinket, whose only offspring is her script and whose only love is Platonic, setting up another bawdy joke. As E. Parker, philomath, comments, Fossile’s putting his ­Family to the Trial with Lubomirski’s Drops, is a wretched Absurdity, h ­ ere is a Stage full of ­People, who have no Business in the Play, brought in by Head and Shoulders, only for the introducing of this charming Definition. Clink. How do the Platonists and Cartesians differ ­Uncle? Foss. The Platonists are for Ideas, the Cartesians for ­Matter and Motion. This Vile Obscenity is call’d Humour; but more of this her ­a fter. The Hoop-­ Petticoat at the Close of this Act, is but a poor Incident, tho’ the only one in the ­whole Farce.80

Parker’s criticisms return attention to the sexual nature of Gay’s farce. Both the double entendre and the petticoat scheme alluded to ­here focus audience attention once more on sex and the female anatomy. Th ­ ere is serious business between ­t hose lines and beneath that petticoat, however, as laughter disguises pragmatic concerns. Sara D. Luttfring’s concerns from The Changeling hold true ­here as well, with virginity “crucial in determining a w ­ oman’s value on the marriage market and ensuring the legitimacy of her husband’s familial line.”81 In the ­later period, Mary Fissell argues, w ­ omen’s reproductive bodies became “productive yet troubling analogies to the mysterious generativity of capitalism itself,” and “older workshop meta­phors about reproduction w ­ ere supplanted by commercial and mercantile 82 images.” Fissell finds this in the character of Polly Peachum in Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera: “the ways that female reproductive bodies are like the mysteries of the stock market are such a commonplace that they serve to make the audience laugh.”83 The meta­phor of Clinket’s material production (her play) as offspring is paralleled by the words used to describe Susanna’s a­ ctual child, pre­sent onstage, in the final scene: “Invoice” and “Cargo.”84 The sailor who brings the infant on tells Fossile that “­t here is no Boarding a pretty Wench, without Charges one way or other; you are a Doctor, Master, and have no Surgeons Bills to pay; and so can the better afford it,” and then he explains, “I was neither by when his M ­ other was Stow’d, nor when

“ T o u c h - ­S t o n e o f V i r g i n i t y ”

55

she was Unladen; ­W hether he belong to a fair Trader or be Run Goods, I cannot tell.”85 The mercantile and scientific concerns fi­nally unite as Fossile is bested by the five proofs of filiation provided by a fellow doctor. Even though Fossile has not “had Carnal Knowledge of any W ­ oman,” he is declared to be the f­ ather of the child; and even as he protests his wife’s virginity, the Lord Chief Justice’s “Business” reveals Susanna’s prior marriage.86 Alone onstage with his child who is not his, Fossile delivers a final speech: “Fossile thou didst want Posterity: ­Here behold thou hast it. A Wife thou didst not want; Thou hast none. But thou art caressing a Child that is not thy own. What then? A Thousand, and a Thousand Husbands are d ­ oing the same Th ­ ing this very Instant; and the Knowledge of Truth is desirable, and makes thy Case the better.”87 ­Here, at last, anatomical truth is known, not through science but through the exchanges of sailors. This knowledge bests Fossile’s “Carnal Knowledge” (or lack thereof); he prefers his “Posterity.” Harol points out that Fossile’s language in the play “is marked by a wistfully excessive desire for scientific evidence of virginity, by skepticism of the medical profession’s ability to provide such proofs, by a lament for the incompatibility of knowledge and sexual plea­sure, and by a fear that the deceptive and inscrutable female body threatens masculine dominion.”88 While it is accurate to say that Fossile’s prob­lems arise “from his reliance on the methods of science,” it is also scientific knowledge that allows the audience to be in on the joke.89 Only an ignorant audience member would assume that a trick from a hundred-­year-­old tragedy would still work. Even though it is clear that Fossile is ignorant, a comic ending restores (patriarchal) order: in his final monologue, he gains what he desires (knowledge, posterity), while confessing that sex is unimportant. Though Fossile is a figure of satire, as John Fuller states, “our sympathies are surely with him.”90 Once succession has been secured, the technology of virginity is irrelevant. One telling anecdote from the production history of Three Hours a­ fter Marriage contributes to our understanding of ­women’s lost agency. On the fourth night of its original run, the following incident occurred: “The droll facetious [William] Penkethman, was that amphibious devourer, the crocodile, where the painter, the tailor, with other artificers had us’d their utmost skill. . . . ​Penkethman, the crocodile, boasting much in the beauty of his long tail, and, traversing the stage, unfortunately made such a parade with it, that he threw down Sarsnet (the attendant and confidant of Mrs. Townley) flat upon her back, where she discovered more linnen than other habiliments, and more skin and flesh than linnen; this began the first uproar in the audience.”91 Half an hour of chaos ensued. Adding insult to the injury of poor Sarsnet, the letter in which this anecdote appears concludes that “it is some danger, to give a ­woman room to talk.”92 The pasteboard creations ­were so popu­lar that ­Mummy and Crocodile appeared in another Drury Lane farce de­cades ­later. The phallic shenanigans of male characters outlived any contribution from the w ­ omen involved. By the time of the late-­century obstetric atlases by the renowned man-­midwife William Smellie (1754) and William Hunter (1774), the level of anatomical detail

56

Thom as A. Oldha m

had reached a point of unpre­ce­dented verisimilitude. Lyle Massey concludes that it is this scientific knowledge that brings “the pregnant female body and childbirth into the purview of the (male) medical specialist.”93 Paradoxically, though, the predominance of the medical aspects of reproduction, the forceps, the increase of surgeons regularly attending births, and the large number of male midwives led to a decreased ability to control ­women’s sexual lives outside of pregnancy, including their virginity. Harol recounts that while “midwives previously had been called in by courts to confirm pregnancy, virginity, and even impotence, this function of the traditional midwife dis­appeared.”94 Despite science and medicine providing a greater understanding of female bodies to men, gaps w ­ ere still pre­sent in that knowledge. ­These gaps ­were navigable, but only within a ­limited range. Couched within the satire of Three Hours a­ fter Marriage, Susanna Townley’s performative virginity functions on several levels. The first and most obvious is the mockery of an idiotic husband in a play that, as Winton says, follows broad comedic outlines: “A ­great deal of ink has been spilled in identifying the satiric victims in Three Hours a­ fter Marriage, much of it spilled in vain. The play is understandable without footnotes.”95 Susanna makes a fool out of her husband, passing his test, while her sexual history c­ auses her no harm. Any potential progressive reading is undercut, however, by the realities of the eigh­teenth ­century. An economic reading of Susanna’s performed virginity is more complex. While ninety-­five years’ worth of changes in science and technology transformed the virginity test from a tragedy to a farce, ­these changes came at the expense of the female body: Townley’s sexually f­ ree existence is that of a mere exchangeable set of goods. Though Three Hours a­ fter Marriage pokes fun at Dr. Fossile, the ­women fare even worse. In the end, Susanna is trapped in her marriage to the unseen Lieutenant; ­after this revelation, she is silenced and never speaks again. Clinket, the laughingstock bluestocking, is unproductive in both mind and body. Her only hope would be to write a comedy based on t­ hese events, but that seems unlikely to be any good. Meanwhile, Fossile, though chastened, gets what he wants; patriarchal systems of control exert dominance. While scientific knowledge and technological advancement come with gains, they do not apply equally to every­one.

notes Special thanks to Kaylee Pomelow, my research assistant. 1.  E. Parker, A Complete KEY to the New Farce, Call’d “Three Hours a­ fter Marriage” (London, 1717), 9. 2.  For summaries of existing scholarship, see Bruce Boehrer, “Alsemero’s Closet: Privacy and Interiority in The Changeling,” Journal of En­glish and Germanic Philology 96, no.  3 (July 1997): 349–350; Dale B. J. Randall, “Some Observations on the Theme of Chastity in The Changeling,” En­glish Literary Re­nais­sance 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1984): 353. 3.  Randall, “Some Observations,” 360. 4.  Boehrer, “Alsemero’s Closet,” 353–354. 5.  Randall, “Some Observations,” 358–359. 6.  George Walton Williams, introduction to The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, ed. George Walton Williams (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), xiii; Martin  W. Sampson, ed., Thomas Middleton (New York: American Book Com­pany, 1915), 402n342.

“ T o u c h - ­S t o n e o f V i r g i n i t y ”

57

7.  For a survey of vari­ous tests and tricks, see Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the ­Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2000), 28–33; Randall, “Some Observations,” 355–358. 8.  Johann Jacob Wecker, Eigh­teen Books of the Secrets of Art & Nature (London, 1660), 104. 9. Marie  H. Loughlin, Hymeneutics: Interpreting Virginity on the Early Modern Stage (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1997), 29–47. 10.  Swapan Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 159. 11.  Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 12.  Karen Harvey, “The C ­ entury of Sex? Gender, Bodies, and Sexuality in the Long Eigh­ teenth C ­ entury,” The Historical Journal 45, no. 4 (December 2002): 899–916. 13. Mary  E. Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern ­England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 12. 14.  Ibid., 114. 15.  Ibid., 165. 16.  Lauren Kassell, “Medical Understandings of the Body, c. 1500–1750,” in The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, ed. Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher (London: Routledge, 2013), 66. 17. Ibid. 18.  Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia ([London], 1615), 235. 19.  Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives (London, 1651), 28–29. 20.  Giovanni Benedetto Sinibaldi, Rare Verities: The Cabinet of Venus Unlocked and Her Secrets Laid Open (London, 1658), 57–58. 21.  Ibid., 59–60. 22.  Corinne Harol, Enlightened Virginity in Eighteenth-­Century Lit­e r­a­ture (New York: Macmillan, 2006), 59. 23.  Thomas Chamberlayne, The Compleat Midvvife’s Practice Enlarged ([London,] 1659), 303–304; Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book (London, 1671), 266–267. 24.  Caroline Bicks, “Stones like ­Women’s Paps: Revising Gender in Jane Sharp’s Midwives Book,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (Fall–­Winter 2007): 1–27. 25.  Thomas Gibson, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomized (London, 1682), 147–148. 26.  Ibid., 154. 27.  Aristotele’s Master-­Piece (London, 1684), 93. 28.  Ibid., 94. 29.  Robert Barret, A Companion for Midwives, Child-­Bearing W ­ omen, and Nurses (London, 1699), 50. 30.  William Cowper, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies (London, 1698), t­ able 51, fig. 3. 31.  Michael Etmullerus, Etmullerus Abridg’d (London, 1703), 582–583. 32.  Nicolas Venette, The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’d, 2nd ed. (London, 1707), 67–68. 33.  Ibid., 69. 34.  John Marten, Gonosologium Novum (London, 1709), 74, 75. 35.  Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, rev. ed. (London, 1716), 231. 36.  Ibid., 29. 37.  Ibid., 232. 38.  Ibid., 233. 39. Fissell, Vernacular Bodies, 196. 40.  Aristotele’s Master-­Piece, 95. 41.  Kassell, “Medical Understandings,” 57. 42.  Michael Stolberg, “Examining the Body, c. 1500–1750,” in Toulalan and Fisher, The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, 91. 43. Kelly, Performing Virginity, 28–33. 44.  John Leake, Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (London, 1787), 5; emphasis in original. 45.  Adrian Wilson, The Making of Man-­Midwifery: Childbirth in ­England, 1660–1770 (Cam­ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 38.

58

Thom as A. Oldha m

46.  Lisa Forman Cody, “The Politics of Reproduction: From Midwives’ Alternative Public Sphere to the Public Spectacle of Man-­Midwifery,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 32, no.  4 (Summer 1999): 485. 47.  Ibid., 486–487, among o ­ thers. 48.  Caroline Bicks, Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s E ­ ngland (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 62. 49.  Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 15. 50.  Tassie Gwilliam, “Female Fraud: Counterfeit Maidenheads in the Eigh­teenth ­Century,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 6, no. 4 (April 1996): 518. 51. Harol, Enlightened Virginity, 69. 52.  Harvey Graham, Eternal Eve (London: William Heinemann Medical Books, 1950), 188. 53.  While it is easy to overstate the forceps’ importance in the displacement of midwives, it may have been a necessary “precondition.” Wilson, The Making of Man-­Midwifery, 101. 54.  Shannon Westin, “The Obstetric Forceps: Shrouded in Mystery,” Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey 61, no. 6 (June 2006): 357. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Leake, Midwifery, cover, 43. 58.  Bettina Wahrig, “Clocks with Hands: Instruments, Hands and Parturients in a Changing Horizon of Time,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 35, no. 1 (2013): 62. 59.  Lyle Massey, “Pregnancy and Pathology: Picturing Childbirth in Eighteenth-­Century Obstetric Atlases,” The Art Bulletin 87, no.  1 (March  2005): 73–91; Cody, “The Politics of Reproduction”; among ­others. 60. Wilson, The Making of Man-­Midwifery, 91–101. 61.  J. L. Austin’s concept of the performative (an utterance that “is the performing of an action—it is not normally thought of as just saying something”) allows Judith Butler to ask performative questions of gender and the body: “To what extent does the body come into being in and through the mark(s) of gender? How do we reconceive the body no longer as a passive medium or instrument awaiting the enlivening capacity of a distinctly immaterial ­will?” Austin, How to Do Th ­ ings with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 7; Butler, Gender Trou­ble, 10th anniversary ed. (London: Taylor and Francis, 1999), 13. 62.  Mara Amster, “Frances Howard and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling: T ­ rials, Tests, and the Legibility of the Virgin Body,” in The Single W ­ oman in Medieval and Early Modern ­England: Her Life and Repre­sen­ta­tion, ed. Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Re­nais­sance Studies, 2003), 232. 63.  Sara D. Luttfring, “Bodily Narratives and the Politics of Virginity in The Changeling and the Essex Divorce,” Re­nais­sance Drama 39, no. 1 (2011): 98. Moving forward to studies of the eigh­teenth ­century, Soile Ylivuori cites Erving Goffman in saying, “chastity should be understood as a complex system of per­for­mances and pre­sen­ta­tions.” Ylivuori even explic­itly labels chastity as “performative” (although without citing Austin or Butler). Ylivuori, “Rethinking Female Chastity and Gentlewomen’s Honour in Eighteenth-­Century ­England,” The Historical Journal 59, no. 1 (March 2016): 73, 74. Further, Sarah Salih applies Butler’s ideas of performative gender to the e­ arlier Katherine group, in which she finds the concept of virginity to be “a successful rearticulation of the heterosexual hegemony.” Salih, “Performing Virginity: Sex and Vio­lence in the Katherine Group,” in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the M ­ iddle Ages, ed. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 98. 64.  Bert  O. States, ­Great Reckonings in L ­ ittle Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 20. 65.  Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988), 57. See also Marc Silverstein’s exegesis of Hélène Cixous’s work, which “points to the coercive model of identification that characterizes the illusionistic stage—­a model forcing ­women to define their subject position as spectators in terms of the victimization and objectification

“ T o u c h - ­S t o n e o f V i r g i n i t y ”

59

demanded both by the unfolding of the narrative enacted on stage, and by a scopic economy that splits visual plea­sure between an active male specular subject . . . ​a nd the passive female specular object.” Silverstein, “ ‘Body-­Presence’: Cixous’s Phenomenology of Theater,” Theatre Journal 43, no. 4 (December 1991): 507. 66. Fissell, Vernacular Bodies, 153. 67.  Calhoun Winton, John Gay and the London Theatre (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 51; George Sherburn, “The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Three Hours a­ fter Marriage,” Modern Philology 24, no. 1 (August 1926): 93; among ­others. 68. Al Coppola, The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natu­ral Philosophy in Eighteenth-­ Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 107. 69. Parker, A Complete Key, 9. 70. Winton, John Gay, 55. For an opposing view, see Sherburn, “Fortunes and Misfortunes.” 71.  Cody, “The Politics of Reproduction,” 483. 72.  Katherine Mannheimer, “The Scriblerian Stage and Page: Three Hours a­ fter Marriage, Pope’s ‘Minor’ Poems, and the Prob­lem of Genre-­History,” Comparative Drama 43, no.  1 (Spring 2009): 66. 73.  Ibid., 70. 74.  While the play satirizes its antiquarian, t­ hese views w ­ ere not necessarily progressive. Coppola, The Theater of Experiment, 107–109. 75.  Susan Gubar, “The Female Monster in Augustan Satire,” Signs 3, no. 2 (Winter 1977): 389. 76.  John Gay, Three Hours ­after Marriage (1717), in John Gay: Dramatic Works, ed. John Fuller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 241. 77.  Ibid., 241. 78.  Ibid., 242. 79. Ibid. 80. Parker, A Complete Key, 10. 81.  Luttfring, “Bodily Narratives,” 98. 82.  Mary Fissell, “Remaking the Maternal Body in E ­ ngland, 1680–1730,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26, no. 1 (January 2017): 115, 118. 83.  Ibid., 138. 84. Gay, Three Hours, 255–256. 85.  Ibid., 256–267. 86.  Ibid., 260. 87.  Ibid., 261. 88. Harol, Enlightened Virginity, 131. 89.  Ibid., 133. 90.  John Fuller, introduction to John Gay: Dramatic Works, ed. John Fuller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 31. 91.  Letter reproduced in Three Hours a­ fter Marriage (Dublin, 1761), 221. 92.  Ibid., 222. 93.  Massey, “Pregnancy and Pathology,” 74. 94. Harol, Enlightened Virginity, 76. 95. Winton, John Gay, 53.

chapter 4

•

Gulliver’s Travels, Automation, and the Reckoning Author Zachary M. Mann

Lemuel Gulliver’s “Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi . . . ,” in the third book of what is commonly referred to as Gulliver’s Travels (1726), is one of the most famous encounters between scientific knowledge and the literary imagination. For that reason, most scholarship on the third voyage has focused on the ways in which Jonathan Swift draws inspiration from and responds to the natu­ral phi­los­o­phers on his bookshelves. Scholars point to similarities between Swift’s Acad­emy of Projectors at Lagado and the Royal Society of London for Improving Natu­ral Knowledge, founded in 1660.1 Marjorie Nicolson and Nora Mohler noted that the impractical proj­ects at Lagado resemble ­actual ones reported in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and many scholars since have pointed out that Swift was well versed in the works produced by the Society, including Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal-­Society (1667), and The Philosophical Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (1725). Swift even visited the Society at Gresham College in 1710.2 The common refrain throughout Swift scholarship is that the author used this insight to shine a light on the cost of the Society’s questionable priorities in the face of imperial brutality. The third voyage is often framed as a satirical response to ­t hese real-­world projectors. The experiment at Lagado referenced most often is the “Proj­ect for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operators,” a machine powered by ­humans turning cranks that, by randomization and without ­human thought, “may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology.”3 Scholars have discussed this “wonderful Machine,” as Gulliver refers to it, in one of three ways: as a critique of nonexperiential knowledge making, traced often to Isaac Newton’s aside in Principia, that “we could derive the other phenomena of nature from mechanical princi­ples by the same kind of reasoning”;4 relatedly, as an early example of machine thinking that foreshadows the rise of the algorithm in digital culture; or, most often, as a parody of a burgeoning, un­regu­ la­ted print industry that figuratively produces nonsense. In ­every case, Swift is 60

G u l l i v e r’s T r av e l s a n d t h e r e c k o n i n g au t h o r

61

r­ epresented as an “ancient” responding to “modern” systems of knowledge dissemination pop­u ­lar­ized by the Royal Society (and a book trade that rewards its imitation). The Society operates on the notion that truth is discovered or generated rather than evident or abstract, and for ancients like Swift, this modern approach splintered truth into a heterogeneity of pseudo-­truths produced ­either by experiments that transform idiosyncratic perception into fact or by misguided beliefs that just b ­ ecause it is printed, it must be true.5 Recently, scholars of science and lit­er­a­ture have complicated the notion that Swift merely responds to the cultural production of the Royal Society. In The Experimental Imagination, Tita Chico argues that, rather than writing literary reflection alone, Swift participates in the shaping of scientific knowledge.6 Writing on the second voyage, Gregory Lynall in Swift and Science compares Swift’s matter-­ of-­fact style to Hooke’s, suggesting that Swift parodies and thus reveals “the scientific treatise as a literary form.”7 Gulliver’s descriptions of the Acad­emy experiments are not dissimilar, on the surface, to the Philosophical Transactions, right down to the inclusion of diagrams. And, as a print commodity, Gulliver’s Travels resembled the other publications in circulation by Swift’s publisher, Benjamin Motte, which tended to be works of natu­ral philosophy.8 Thus, Swift writes amid and in the form of modern knowledge dissemination, arguably contributing to its living discourse. One strategy of like-­minded critics has been to put into conversation Swift’s descriptions of the miniature Gulliver in Brobdingnag with l­ater thinkers who conceive of the body and world as machine-­like.9 In such works, the popu­lar interest in automata demonstrates a paradigm shift among the ­middle classes, and Swift’s rendering of Gulliver as an automaton helps orient readers to this new worldview. Comparing the second voyage to ­f uture works, such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1747) or the theatrical automata of Jacques de Vaucanson (1737), has elicited discussions of Swift as an agent in man’s changing relationship to technology. In this essay, I am also interested in Swift’s position ­toward and contribution to the sciences of the eigh­teenth ­century. However, rather than focusing on Swift’s relationship to figures such as Boyle and Newton, I am interested in the ­things that make up arguably the most consequential technology of his ­century: the machines found in textile mills. As Jennifer L. Lieberman points out in “Finding a Place for Technology,” literary scholars tend to f­ avor the discursive similarities between lit­ er­at­ ure and science.10 In so ­doing, they have not only left the material realities of Gulliver’s Travels largely unexcavated but also neglected the tension caused by Swift’s interest in both science and industry. In the c­ entury between the founding of the Royal Society and the Society of Civil Engineers (1771), machines moved from laboratories to mills, and narratives of technological innovation shifted from philosopher-­i nventors to industrialists like James Hargreaves and Richard Arkwright. Over the course of Swift’s ­career, the British Empire was transitioning from its age of science to an age of machinery, and in his surviving correspondence, it is more common to find the author discussing woolen manufacture than the treatises of the intellectual elite. Swift, for whom the intervention of learned virtuosi

62

Z ach a ry M. M a n n

into economic affairs is a highly contested and politicized arena, was intimately aware of—­and even helped to shape—­t hese flows of techne. Attending to science’s industrialization, in this essay I examine anew Gulliver’s third voyage, troubling the Royal Society’s privileged status in its scholarship and situating Swift’s satire in histories of technology—­especially the inventions of textile machines and their influence on constructions of l­ abor. Ultimately, I reconsider the “Proj­ect for improving speculative Knowledge” in order to revisit Swift’s critiques of knowledge making as they are embodied in a machine inspired by the inventions of its day. In fact, as the next section of this essay demonstrates, machine innovation figures throughout Gulliver’s Travels. Rather than comparing the experiments at Lagado to works such as Man a Machine, I compare Swift’s par­ tic­u­lar notions of automation to ­actual engines in development in Eu­rope, from spinning mills to the automated silk drawloom and punch-­card programming systems in­ven­ted by Basile Bouchon in 1725, improved by Jacques de Falcon in 1728 and Vaucanson in 1745, and eventually perfected by Joseph-­Marie Jacquard. ­These drawlooms are uniquely situated in the history of technology b ­ ecause they span the philosopher-­i nventor’s workshop to the textile mill. They embody the shift, which Francis Bacon intended for learned socie­ties, from the experimental laboratory to the administration of public good. And they illustrate, for Simon Schaffer and o ­ thers, that automata ­were not only meta­phors but also “played a significant role in the manufacturing economy.”11 In this essay, I follow the work of Barbara Hahn, treating machines as nodes via which historians can connect science to histories of l­abor and commodities—­even before the patents w ­ ere issued. As Gillian Cookson writes in The Age of Machinery, challenges in wool and silk manufacture led to local innovations that predate Hargreaves’s spinning jenny and Arkwright’s ­water frame, only becoming part of the “Industrial Revolution” when industrialists scaled machines to meet the demands of the cotton trade.12 The same can be said of Bouchon’s and Falcon’s drawlooms, which, due to reactionary views within the Lyonnaise silk industry, w ­ ere tabled u ­ ntil Jacquard’s lifetime. ­These early machines operated as harbingers of ­f uture mechanization, circulated in print by the intellectual elite. Their conceptual designs developed into engines of commerce via the same discourses within which Swift operated. Reading the “Proj­ect for improving speculative Knowledge” through this material history reconceptualizes eighteenth-­century knowledge production in industrial terms. Textile manufacture served as vanguard for all machine innovation; any changing attitudes ­toward ­labor in the textile trade (e.g., weaving) influenced analogous attitudes in other industries (e.g., book publication). Automated weaving technology promised to replace the craftsperson’s role, even the act of composition, with a mechanical pro­cess; meanwhile, recent copyright laws inaugurated authors and inventors as autonomous ­owners of their own ideas. As Joseph Loewenstein writes in The Author’s Due, any “transformation in the available means of storing and distributing information inevitably requires of a culture that it renegotiate its conception of how information is produced.”13 While new technologies w ­ ere revolutionizing the concept of material production in ­England, ­legal

G u l l i v e r’s T r av e l s a n d t h e r e c k o n i n g au t h o r

63

discourses—­from the Statute of Monopolies to the Statute of Anne—­were engaging in the individuation of creative endeavor centered on the h ­ uman subject.14 Swift’s “wonderful Machine” thus provides an opportunity to discuss the methods by which the figure of the author or inventor is separated, conceptually, from more mechanical aspects of intellectual ­labor at a moment when t­ hese categories are in flux. As this essay shows, despite Swift’s sympathies for the ­peoples below Laputa, his work contributes to the aforementioned cultural proj­ect by using machines of early industrial innovation to hierarchize types of thinking, constructing the industrial half of authorship as mere reckoning.

Spinners and Weavers Throughout Gulliver’s Travels, the textile industry recurs in three ways: as an anchor for Gulliver’s unstable relationship to the size of objects, as a narrative strategy to describe ­imagined worlds in familiar terms, and as an allegory for ­England’s economic oppression of Ireland. In regard to the first, consider how the Lilliputians describe Gulliver’s pocket watch: “he put this Engine to our Ears, which made an incessant Noise like that of a Water-­Mill.” ­Here clockwork, emblematic of the small, intricate designs of seventeenth-­century virtuosi, are translated by Swift’s shifting positionality into the crude batteries of more recent industrial production. In another episode, Gulliver makes dainty Lilliputian artifacts of war by comparing them to knitting n ­ eedles; in multiple other chapters, the fineness or coarseness of clothing reflects his size in relation to the livestock of his hosts. And in one especially memorable image from the second voyage, a miniature Gulliver compares the purring of a cat to “a noise b ­ ehind [him] like that of a dozen Stocking-­Weavers at work.”15 A dozen machines in operation suggests something like a mill; a stocking-­weaver is “one who weaves with a stocking-­frame,” the mechanical knitting machine in­ven­ted by William Lee in Nottingham that kick-­started the first Industrial Revolution.16 In this view, the Brobdingnagian farmer’s cat audibly signals the transition of textile production from handwork, something small rural families might have toiled at on their own, to mechanized mass production, emasculating the diminished stature of a man—­figuratively for the farmers and literally for Gulliver. Thus, Swift’s horrors of scale can also be read as anx­i­eties t­ oward the proliferation and increasing size of industrial artifacts. As Jonathan Sawday makes clear in Engines of the Imagination, Eu­rope at the time was not lacking for machine noise; it would not have been strange for Swift to compare a loud sound to mill power.17 Stocking-­frames, by then in use for over a c­ entury, would have been easy to recognize for a general readership, and stocking-­ weavers had over that time become consolidated u ­ nder single roofs. Hahn writes anecdotally that, by the 1720s, “one hosier employed more than forty apprentices” and, to hide the machines, “erected a large building in Nottingham.”18 In general, as Cookson notes, “textile technologies, which evolved steadily over the centuries, saw a gathering change in pace in the early eigh­teenth c­ entury.”19 By 1717 t­ here was a flax mill in Ireland and, by 1726, a lint mill in Scotland, both powered by w ­ ater.

64

Z ach a ry M. M a n n

The most famous inventions w ­ ere ­t hose that mechanized spinning—­t he pro­cess of making fibers into yarn—­a nd while t­ hese culminated in Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule of 1779, they belong to a long history of innovation that begins with patents in 1678.20 Arkwright’s 1769 frame, which used rollers to draw and twist fiber, was not much dif­fer­ent from John Wyatt and Lewis Paul’s 1738 patent, which was in turn adapted for wool and cotton from an Italian silk-­throwing system that had already been imported to Derby in 1702.21 In other words, that Brobdingnagian ­house cat was compared to increasingly normalized phenomena. As o ­ thers have pointed out, Swift prob­ably borrowed such machines to render quotidian his most speculative inventions. For instance, in describing the “floating” technology of Laputa, Swift contrives “a Load-­stone of a prodigious size, in shape resembling a Weavers Shut­tle.”22 Lynall suggests that, “by domesticating this technology of the foreign ‘other’ through direct comparison with Eu­ro­pean invention, Gulliver’s description resembles the rhetorical strategies of many essays published in the Philosophical Transactions.”23 What Lynall does not mention is that the inventor credited with the “flying” weaver’s shut­t le, John Kay, was not a member of the Royal Society but a hand-­loom reed maker in Lancashire. The innovation was a piece of wood with which the weaver could, by pulling a string, send the shut­t le “flying” along a track without the need of an assistant. The mythic version of the story dates Kay’s patent to 1733 and credits him for creating the bottleneck necessary to inspire ­future innovations in spinning. However, revisions to this history suggest that the flying shut­t le was both ­adopted very gradually and in development for years prior.24 Though Swift is unlikely to have based his “Weavers Shut­tle” on Kay’s, he knowingly draws comparisons between a device by which the island of Laputa floats above Balnibarbi and an object very much at the center of ongoing innovations in weaving. Thus, Gulliver makes practical the wondrous, but he also translates that science into objects that directly impact the economies of the British Empire. Swift was more than interested in the textile industry. In multiple letters written during the 1720s, he blames the economic crisis in Ireland on ­England’s Navigation Acts and especially the Woollen Act of 1699, which relegated Ireland to a colony, prohibited the exportation of Irish woolen manufacture, and forced Ireland to export its raw wool to heavi­ly levied En­glish ports.25 The cause was dear to him; he even met with Dublin’s Corporation of Weavers in Woollen and Silks ­multiple times to encourage more sustainable practices in the Irish textile sector. (Despite Gulliver’s seeming loyalty ­toward ­England, ­there was prob­ably much bitterness ­behind Swift’s words when Gulliver hopes the flock of Lilliputian sheep he delivers to ­England would “prove much to the Advantage of the Woollen Manufacture, by the Fineness of the Fleeces.”)26 As Lynall points out, in comparing the technology by which Laputa wields martial power over its colonies to a weaver’s shut­t le, Swift uses a piece of a loom “as a symbol of Britain’s economic grip over Ireland.” This was legible rhe­toric; a “key” published alongside Gulliver’s Travels identified the load-­stone as “a just Emblem of the British Linen and Woollen Manufactures.”27 While some of Swift’s ire is reserved for the projectors, his letters

G u l l i v e r’s T r av e l s a n d t h e r e c k o n i n g au t h o r

65

place greater blame on the industrialists in Yorkshire and Lancashire, whose innovations he resents for spinning Irish wool. Th ­ ere is something whimsical about a floating island, just as the many contrivances of learned socie­ties seem harmless in their laboratories. But for Swift, when mechanized to an industrial scale, the most innocent ideas can incur terrible costs. In ­t hose letters, Swift calls for the ­people of Ireland to start wearing only Irish wool and asks Irish weavers to improve their manufacture to further reduce demand for imported goods. One of the experiments in the Acad­emy at Lagado seems to share Swift’s sympathies. When Gulliver enters this room, he finds it covered in spider­webs. Inside, an “Artist” explains his proj­ect to replace imported silkworms with “Domestick Insects.”28 The plan mirrors Swift’s calls for support of Irish over foreign manufacture; ­here the spider provides the possibility of locally sustainable textile production while the Chinese or French silkworm stands in for En­g lish imports threatening the Irish economy. Scholarship tends to agree that Swift, in his repre­sen­ta­tions of Laputan experiments, makes material what the Philosophical Transactions convey in aspirational language. But in this case, Swift literalizes a recurring reference in his own letters against the Navigation Acts: Ovid’s fable of Arachne and Pallas. In “A proposal for the universal use of Irish manufacture,” Swift writes of the goddess who, jealous of Arachne’s weaving, “turned her into a spider, enjoining her to spin and weave for ever, out of her own bowels, and in a very narrow compass.” Swift admits that he “always pitied poor Arachne, and could never heartily love the goddess on account of so cruel and unjust a sentence.” (It should be noted that Ovid’s Minerva attacks Arachne with a weaver’s shut­t le, similar to the way Laputa uses something “resembling a Weavers Shut­t le” to rain cruelty on the lands below it.) The analogy paints E ­ ngland as the b ­ itter goddess and Ireland as the poor spider, turning a parable about mortal hubris into one about retaining autonomy over one’s ­labor. When it comes to spinning silk, the silkworm was at the time the only v­ iable resource. But Swift renders the Laputan Artist’s spiders more able than cursed; unlike silkworms, they “understood how to weave as well as spin.” Gulliver’s version of Arachne turns the myth into techno-­optimism, a liberating techne by which Ireland can potentially reverse its sentence. One reason the Artist’s spiders “excelled” silkworms, it turns out, is that they are programmable. He explains to Gulliver that the color, strength, and texture of the silk can be determined ahead of time by what he feeds the flies. Gulliver observes “a vast number of Flies most beautifully coloured,” and according to the Artist, “the Webs would take a Tincture from them,” and “Food for the Flys of certain Gums, Oyls, and other glutinous M ­ atter . . . ​give a Strength and Consistence to the Threads.”29 Thus, through a kind of insect husbandry, the customized weaving of silk is predetermined, requiring no additional h ­ uman ­labor. While this proj­ect ­will prob­ably suffer the same fate as the ­others at the Acad­emy, for this momentary fantasy, Swift borrows something only recently pos­si­ble in industrial sectors: the mechanical production of a commercial good that is repeatable through the use of objects inscribed with instructions by h ­ uman hands. Since the drawloom first migrated to Italy in the

66

Z ach a ry M. M a n n

thirteenth ­century, the race to invent the perfect “coded object,” and thereby to be able to automate the weaving pro­cess, motivated much of Eu­rope’s machine innovation. Swift’s “Flys” behave not unlike the cylinders in­ven­ted by Vaucanson for his automata or, in­ven­ted by Bouchon only a year before Gulliver’s Travels was published, the perforated paper tape of the first programmable loom. By 1725, Bouchon figured out a way to replace the communication between weavers and their assistants with perforated paper tape, wherein a s­ imple binary—­ whether or not a hole in the paper blocked a spring-­loaded needle—­determined if the assistant should pull down on the lash that, in turn, lifted the warp (or group of threads).30 Falcon soon a­ fter replaced this tape with a sewn-­together chain of hole-­punched pasteboard cards—or “punch cards.” ­These coded objects, the most impor­tant such objects in machine programming history, essentially removed intellectual ­labor from the production of patterned silk. Even the weaver’s l­abor was minimized, for all patterning was done beforehand and could be reproduced as long as the punch cards kept their integrity. Eventually Vaucanson designed a punch-­card system to fully control the warp (and thus, by alerting the machine ­whether or not to lift the thread groups mechanically, rendered unnecessary the assistant altogether). By the nineteenth c­ entury, designers only needed to draw the preferred pattern and send it to an artist; the artist then punched holes in pasteboard cards such that, when fed through a jacquard loom, it would weave into the silk the exact pattern preconditioned by the manufacturer. With dyes, gums, and oils instead of a hole-­puncher, Swift’s Artist accomplishes the same with flies. Swift’s spiders do not predict the jacquard loom, but the spider room in the Acad­emy at Laputa resembles a vision of automation. This vision would be articulated in the November 1745 edition of Mercure de France, prompted by Vaucanson’s invention: “a machine with which a ­horse, an ox or an ass [can] make cloth more beautiful and much more perfect than the most skilled silk-­workers.”31 Though Vaucanson’s drawloom failed to change the industry, it would have, in theory, made it pos­si­ble for the weaver to merely stand around as nonhuman forces did the work, like the Artist in Laputa, who only watches the spiders as they spin and weave without need for direction. Swift maps this imaginary onto tiny animals. Similar scenes occur in the first two voyages: a horde of Lilliputians—­including “two hundred Sempstresses” and “three hundred Taylors”—­crawl over Gulliver’s ­giant body to mea­sure him for clothes, reminiscent of the or­ga­nized movement of ants; the aforementioned sheep that Gulliver delivers to E ­ ngland are bug-­like in size; and the king of Brobdingnag alternatingly refers to the tiny Gulliver as “a piece of Clock-­work” and an “insect.”32 With the exception of the purring cat, ­t hese other­ wise ­human or mammalian figures are described as insectoid, even verminous. Some, including the cat, are also rendered machinic. The silkworm spins ­because it is genet­ically programmed to do so. The spider weaves in geometric patterns. Groups of insects move as if synced to a network. In a work associated with questions of h ­ uman versus animal, mechanical ­labor forms a new (if still animalistic and subhuman) category.

G u l l i v e r’s T r av e l s a n d t h e r e c k o n i n g au t h o r

67

The Knowledge Mill Two of the more memorable machines in Gulliver’s Travels are not related to textile production, at least at first glance. The first is designed so Gulliver can turn pages in Brobdingnag. The tiny Gulliver required this machine ­because the books ­were “as thick and stiff as a Past-­board, and . . . ​eigh­teen or twenty Foot long.” The second machine, oddly the same size as Brobdingnagian books, is the perversely bookish “Proj­ect for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operators.”33 In this other room at the Lagado Acad­emy, Gulliver finds a “Professor” with “forty Pupils about him” and a twenty-­foot “Frame.” The frame holds “all the Words of their Language in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any order,” glued to wooden blocks strung by wires. Thirty-­six of the students turn cranks to randomize ­t hese blocks while the remaining four write down any legible sentences formed by happenstance, with the aim to produce “a compleat Body of all Arts and Sciences.”34 Using only h ­ uman muscle power, the “engine” generates books consisting of randomized words. Swift h ­ ere literalizes a strategy that he often uses to satirize shortcuts in writing; in fact, he prob­ably also borrows from his own aside in “A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind” (1707), that he would not believe “the accidental jumbling of Letters of the Alphabet would fall by chance into a most ingenious and learned Treatise of Philosophy.”35 Many scholars interpret the engine as a satire of phi­los­o­phers who have attempted to instrumentalize thought. As Joseph Drury observes in Novel Machines, natu­ral phi­los­o­phers engaged, broadly, in the “mechanization of knowledge making through the introduction of formal rules of method.”36 Lynall suggests that Swift is responding to calculating engines like t­ hose in­ven­ted by Blaise Pascal (1642) and Gottfried Leibniz (1673), whose designs, “to perform mechanically all the operations of arithmetic with certainty and expedition,” ­were regularly discussed in the Philosophical Transactions.37 Leibniz envisioned, using mathe­ matics as a universal language, the construction of an encyclopedia that would include all ­human knowledge and a calculating machine that could parse that knowledge using logic based on Aristotelian categories. Along ­t hese lines, Pamela McCorduck in Machines Who Think calls the engine “a dotty burlesque of Ramon Llull’s Ars Magna.” Llull’s proposed “rings,” articulated disks that recombined old maxims to form new insight, w ­ ere a popu­lar target; François Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel and Bacon in the Advancement of Learning wrote off the “Art of Lullius” as “vanity and imposture” and “nothing of worth,” respectively. Martin Gardner, in Logic Machines and Diagrams, even writes that the Ars Magna “amounted virtually to a satire of scholasticism.”38 Such critics point to Swift’s ire ­toward ­these kinds of get-­k nowledge-­quick schemes and anyone hoping to repair, as the Professor laments to Gulliver, “how laborious the usual Method is of attaining the Arts and Sciences.”39 Swift returns to this subject multiple times. In Gulliver’s Travels, a dif­fer­ent Lagado experiment proposes the delivery of scripture to the brain via the ­con­sumption

68

Z ach a ry M. M a n n

of “a thin Wafer,” inscribed on in tiny lettering.40 And in A Tale of a Tub, the author devises a step-­by-­step r­ ecipe for attaining truth by snorting the desired books.41 The recurring meta­phors of the digestive system are no coincidence; for Swift, what degrades the learned subject is precisely its translation into material functions, into machines with cogs that grind their teeth. In The ­Battle of the Books (1704), Swift imagines a “Modern Spider of Invention”—­a creature who “displays his g­ reat Skill in Architecture, and Improvement in the Mathematicks” but, b ­ ecause he uses t­ hose princi­ples to avoid learning, produces only cobwebs. This meta­phorical spider, rather than attending to geniuses of the past through study, feeds on—or is, like the weaving spiders in the other room, programmed by—­“the Insects and Vermin of the Age”; like “Modern” phi­los­o­phers who only regurgitate their contemporaries, the spider only ever “Spins and Spits wholly from himself ” to produce cobwebs “spun out of [his] own Entrails.” Swift refers to this programmatic knowledge—­ borrowed from o ­thers and 42 untested in real­ity—as “the Guts of Modern Brains.” The Laputan engine, which uses engineering to produce such “Guts” spun from its own cog work, is the tragic tale of Arachne written onto intellectual l­ abor. The Professor’s engine does more than simply randomize; it also automates production of that so-­called knowledge. The l­ abor that cranking replaces is the act of composition, such that ­after the Professor “emptyed the ­whole Vocabulary into his Frame,” the combining of ­t hose words does not require a thinking subject.43 John Chalker attributes the engine’s inspiration to John Peter’s pamphlet Artificial Versifying, or the Schoolboys Recreation: A New Way to Make Latin Verses (1677).44 Swift would have read the review in The Spectator (1711), which refers to Peter as “an ingenious Projector” who, with “Poetical Logarithms . . . ​divided into several Squares . . . ​inscribed with so many incoherent Words,” is “able to compose or rather to erect Latin Verses.”45 Swift’s engine also “erects”—­t hat is, it builds, constructs, or assem­bles rather than writes—­strings of random words. In ­t hese cases, the building blocks of lit­er­a­ture are vocabulary alone; however, Swift elsewhere has discussed using prewritten phrases (or, to use a twentieth-­century term, lexia) in the composition of literary works.46 His friend Alexander Pope, as Martinus Scriblerus, imagines this in “A Proj­ect for the Advancement of the Bathos” (1727), which mocks the influence of the “other arts of this age” on literary production by proposing the collection of works by specialists—­“ ironists,” “allegorists,” “simile-­ makers,” and the like—­into a “cabinet” from which a poet or orator w ­ ill draw out the phrases they need, like playing a piano.47 H ­ ere Pope, the dominating literary figure at the time, attacks the trend in the book trade of programmatic thought; and one might say Swift’s engine functions as a meta­phor for this kind of recombinatory composition. For Swift, such methods have real consequences, especially when used for knowledge making. Recently, historians of the Enlightenment have framed the era as a media event in which written words, through their proliferation in print, begin outpacing the ideas themselves; as Brad Pasanek and Chad Wellmon write in “The Enlightenment Index,” this new literary production “points less to ideas, authors,

G u l l i v e r’s T r av e l s a n d t h e r e c k o n i n g au t h o r

69

phi­los­o­phers, or social organ­izations than from one page to another.”48 Scholars since, this one included, create their own repositories of notes on “paper slips” (real or virtual), with which they compose new works and disseminate new knowledge via reor­ga­ni­za­tion (or regurgitation).49 In A Tale of a Tub, Swift bemoans t­ hose who collect quotations from compendiums rather than original works, thereby treating thoughts as commodities and replacing h ­ uman memory with the objects of their inscription. Kelly Swartz, in “The Maxims of Swift’s Psychological Fiction,” writes that Swift structures A Tale of a Tub as “aphorism ­after aphorism,” and his author becomes a mere “collector of cliché.”50 For Swift, this new “Method, to become Scholars and Wits, without the Fatigue of Reading or of Thinking,” is a dangerous one—­and thus the victim of both his “Modern Spider” and the Laputan knowledge machine.51 ­After the Licensing Act lapsed in 1694, publication expanded, and standards dropped in f­ avor of profits. The index became activated as a mechanism by which knowledge multiplies into all pos­si­ble iterations. In Swift’s view, a new generation of phi­los­o­phers could, by recycling the intellectual ­labor of ­others via works of reference published or collected, concern themselves with self-­ promotion rather than the advancement of learning. One might read Swift’s engine, then, for its resemblance to what Marcus K ­ rajewski in Paper Machines calls “the scholar’s machine”: the manipulation of card indexes and paper slips such that, by allowing the scholar to reorder previously written notes into something virtually new, it behaves as a “text generator.” Jean Paul, in Se­lections from the Dev­il’s Papers (1789), wrote (incorrectly) that “Gulliver saw a machine in Lagado that mixed paper slips to such an extent that anyone they ­were read to could not tell ­whether they ­were read from an ordinary book or not.”52 Paul’s misreading of Swift’s engine imagines this scholarly practice embodied in a wooden frame: each paper slip or index card is a wooden block randomized by the students’ cranking. The frame, in this view, becomes the scholar. Or, to put it another way, t­hese lexia become coded objects—­like “Flys” or punch cards—­ manipulated by assistants in the automated manufacture of lit­er­a­ture. In an illustration included in the second edition of Gulliver’s Travels, the frame even resembles a loom. Due to Swift’s interest in the textile industry, and considering that the  illustrations of stocking-­frames ­were in regular circulation, it is likely that the engine—­a nd prob­ably any mechanical system of wooden blocks, wires, and assistants—­would be influenced by real-­world machinery; according to the Oxford En­glish Dictionary, the word “Frame” was commonly used to refer to machine knitting.53 The comparison is not perfect; yet the engine more accurately weaves rather than writes its “Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology.”54 Swift elsewhere is quick to compare literary and textile production. In his “Letter to the Archbishop of Dublin,” for instance, he adds that not only woolen manufacture but also lit­er­a­ture is more fash­ion­able in Ireland if it is considered “from ­England.” And, in a letter to Motte, Swift encourages Irish booksellers to smuggle their Dublin-­printed books to London, just as he encourages Irish wool manufacturers to export “to any Country in Eu­rope . . . ​and conceal it from the Custom-­house

70

Z ach a ry M. M a n n

Officers,” as he would hide his “Purse from a Highwayman.” Referring to a perceived ban on Irish-­printed lit­er­a­ture, Swift even compares the Statute of Anne to Navigation Acts.55 As many historians of authorship have pointed out, the invention of copyright is also the transformation of ideas into commodities. Swift’s concern with programmatic knowledge is influenced by his concerns regarding for-­ profit writing, too, for which textile goods are a useful derogatory meta­phor. This is similar to the way Bacon compared Llull’s methodized formation of knowledge to the second­hand clothing in “a Fripper’s or Broker’s shop.” Thus, it is fitting that the aforementioned review of Peter’s pamphlet further satirizes Peter’s (and o ­ thers’) approach to poetry with mention of “the Proj­ect of a Dutch Mechanick, viz. a Mill to make Verses,”56 and that Swift’s Professor at Lagado refers to the “reasonable Charge” necessary to operate his engine. It is also fitting that the knowledge engine’s books are ultimately the product of the “bodily ­Labour,” “Six Hours a-­day,” of forty students.57 While it is not the factory scale of “two hundred Sempstresses” and “three hundred Taylors,” ­here Swift has ­imagined, in economic terms, a textile mill for the production of knowledge.58 By the end of the c­ entury, Swift’s engine—­often standing in for a fantasy that machines could automate lit­er­a­ture—­metastasized into a way for critics to devalue the unoriginality of literary works. One reviewer for the Monthly Cata­logue, for instance, regarding the novel The History of Miss Maria Barlowe, accused a w ­ hole swathe of modern novels of being produced by “the famous machine of [Swift’s] Balnibarbian.”59 In such cases, what was machine-­like was the tendency for novels to borrow from formulas (e.g., the happy ending). But for Swift and his contemporaries, commercialism, not a lack of originality, is what earned the mechanical meta­phor. Allison Muri writes in The Enlightenment Cyborg that “the rise of a merchant class had created a ‘mechanical’ identity out of the very tools of a man’s trade.”60 Likewise, in “The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” Swift puts down opportunistic writers of religious works by referring to them as “British Workmen” toiling at a “Trade.” And, in A Tale of a Tub, he describes the modern critic as “a sort of mechanic, set up with a stock and tools for his trade, at as l­ ittle expense as a tailor.”61 As authorship became its own trade, a way to make a living, comparing written works to the products of mechanical ­labor became a way to devalue them; Swift’s critique of such authorship relegates it to a form of l­abor unworthy of his creative class. Like the ­imagined output of his engine, ­t hese works did not require intellect. They w ­ ere not so dif­fer­ent from the self-­spun cobwebs of other machines.

Author-­Inventors When Gulliver parts with the Professor at Lagado, he promises to “do him Justice, as the sole Inventor of this wonderful Machine,” and says “that he should have the Honour entire without a Rival.”62 Gulliver’s choice of words, to identify the Professor as an “Inventor” rather than an author, and by comparing his status elsewhere to “the right Owner” of the entire “Honour” (analogous to a royal patent), places the Professor in the role of the industrialist. Gulliver says nothing

G u l l i v e r’s T r av e l s a n d t h e r e c k o n i n g au t h o r

71

about the “compleat Body” of works that the engine w ­ ill supposedly produce, though it is implied that he would profit from them; the Professor is “the right Owner” of the frame’s designs and thus its manufacture. Throughout the eigh­ teenth ­century, debates for authors’ rights to owner­ship piggybacked on patent law by arguing for “the Resemblance between a Book and any other Mechanical invention.” As Mark Rose points out in Authors and ­Owners, often property produced by hand was confined to the physical object while the fruits of intellectual ­labor extended beyond manuscripts to the ideas within.63 The printing of a book was one ­labor, but the thoughts put into that book ­were more highly valued. Due to this growing ­legal and philosophical divide between making and thinking, the ­labor of the mind became more venerated and mystified, culminating in “lone genius” figures like the late poet John Milton.64 The more physical the production of writing is, the more the intellectual ­labor is located not in the composition but in the concept. Thus, it is the idea of the machine alone that warrants the Professor Gulliver’s praise. As Matthew L. Jones writes in Reckoning with M ­ atter, the cultural proj­ect to insist on authors’ rights “helped make invention more intellectualized” too; machines w ­ ere credited not to the contribution of the artisans who built them, only to “the ideational designs of philosopher-­inventors.” Jones traces an evolution from the single figure of an artisan-­inventor, getting their hands dirty, to “a bifurcation of design” in which one person came up with the idea and ­others made it material.65 In the early seventeenth c­ entury, Pascal was one of the first to argue that “artisanal ­labor should be noncreative” and subordinate to the phi­los­o­pher’s vision. This opinion would be reaffirmed by the authors of the many encyclopedias published in the de­cades ­after, including Denis Diderot, who ignores the role of artisans altogether in the descriptions for his Encyclopédie, erasing their intellectual ­labor. Diderot relegates any nonphi­los­o­pher to a noninventive class that only “practice[s] the mechanical arts that need the least intelligence.”66 With Gulliver’s promise, the Professor also participates in this tradition; despite needing the “bodily L ­ abour” of his students to produce words, and despite the machine’s fully automated method of composing ­those words, the Professor gets sole credit. Swift, literalizing this l­abor relationship via mechanical meta­phor, deconstructs the ­legal category of “Inventor” as one that privileges ideation over industry regardless of who labored. This design bifurcation stays true when t­ here is no phi­los­o­pher involved, which was often the case in textile history. Most tales of industrial innovation are as fictional as Swift’s Professor, spun by Victorian-­era historians as part of the invention of the Industrial Revolution. Before Cartwright patented his power loom, for instance, he “had never before turned [his] thoughts to any t­ hing mechanical, ­either in theory or practice.”67 Before bringing his business savvy to spinning machines, Arkwright was a barber. Hargreaves was an illiterate handloom weaver, such that Robert C. Allen, in “The Industrial Revolution in Miniature,” goes so far as to say his jennies “owed nothing to science.”68 Gravenor Henson’s History of the Framework-­Knitters (1831) describes many more such cases, and John Theo­philus

72

Z ach a ry M. M a n n

Desaguliers admits that “Men quite illiterate have often produc’d wonderful Engines.”69 Yet the rest of the p ­ eople involved in ­t hose inventions—­artisans, engineers, and the like—­become a footnote to the accomplishment of one man who is made to look, in hindsight, as the source of the ideas. To maintain this image of the “lone genius,” all innovation is attributed to whoever can be constructed as the one who ­labors the most intellectually—or, perhaps more accurately, the least mechanically. This required a recursive effort to hierarchize the dif­fer­ent types of ­labor. Swift, for his part, lampoons this pro­cess when the Laputan tailors who design Gulliver new clothes “despise [practical Geometry] as Vulgar and Mechanick.”70 Their self-­fashioning as phi­los­o­phers relies more on their abjection as artisan-­class l­abor than on their philosophical output. Or, to put it another way, the Professor’s l­ abor is intellectual b ­ ecause he does not crank or turn. In eighteenth-­century conceptions of authors and inventors, then, t­ here are two kinds of thinking. Real thinking is inventive, even creative, while mechanical “ratiocination”—to quote Thomas Hobbes—is reduced to mere “reckoning.”71 Thinking with the body, w ­ hether manual l­abor, instinct, or emotion, was a lower order of intellect, that which the liberal h ­ uman subject is defined against. Thus, narratives of invention are often paired with emphases on the lack of sentience beyond the inventor. Diderot in his Encyclopédie notes that weavers often work for forty years in mills “without knowing anything about t­ hese machines” and that a stocking-­frame “makes hundreds of stitches at once . . . ​without the worker who moves the machine understanding anything, knowing anything or even dreaming of it.”72 Inventors of automated literary production tend to similarly demote the m ­ ental capacity of would-be such “authors”; for instance, Peter advertised his pamphlet with the promise that anyone of the “meanest capacity” or “altogether ignorant of arithmetic, and of all lit­er­a­ture” could still utilize his poetry generator.73 The Spectator review burlesques this language, adding, “any one without knowing a Word of Grammar or Sense, may, to his ­great Comfort, be able to compose . . . ​Latin Verses.”74 Pope promises the same in his “A Receipt to Make an Epic Poem,” that “epic poems may be made without a genius, nay without Learning or much Reading.”75 Swift echoes t­ hese comments when the Professor explains to Gulliver that “the most ignorant Person . . . ​w ithout the least Assistance from Genius or Study” can use his engine to produce the greatest of all works.76 Swift elsewhere suggests that automated productions are “ever in greatest Perfection, when managed by Ignorance.”77 While he is referring to the “Art of Canting,” the sentiment reflects that of Adam Ferguson de­cades ­later: “Many mechanical arts require no capacity. They succeed best u ­ nder a total suppression of sentiment and reason.”78 Swift often sides with the p ­ eople caught beneath the intellectual l­abors of natu­ral phi­los­o­phers and figures of state, but he also disapproved of the way the mechanical arts promised the less learned that they could be taken as seriously as the g­ reat minds of the past. His sympathy has a limit. This is ­because, as Muri writes, “to imagine intellectual ­labour as a commercial, manual, and mechanical ­labour constituted an alarming diminishment in the status and profits of the educated gentlemen.”79 Swift pokes fun at the Laputans for claiming that an artisan’s

G u l l i v e r’s T r av e l s a n d t h e r e c k o n i n g au t h o r

73

craft is not intellectual enough to count as science, but he also puts down machine thinking at a time when the intellectual elite is treating textile workers as docile automatons in ser­vice to philosopher-­inventors. His Laputan writing machine is a social critique of a kind, but he neglects the ­actual victims of that experiment: the students. Allen, discussing the empire’s industrialization, points out that the rapid innovations during the eigh­teenth ­century happened in ­England ­because the high cost of craftspeople required the mechanization and thus optimization of the ­labor force, a pro­cess that Ferguson and then Marx responded to in a growing po­liti­cal discourse.80 That pro­cess occurred both on the factory floor and in pamphlets, tracts, and fiction, to which Swift contributed, that helped shape humanity’s changing relationship to new industrial technologies. Textiles aside, the technologies closest to Swift w ­ ere the printing presses that operated, like the author of A Tale of a Tub, “too freely.” Beyond mechanical meta­ phors, Swift attacked London’s commercial printers on Grub Street by borrowing the image that Pope pop­u ­lar­ized in The Dunciad, in which “grubstreet” becomes, as Johnson defines it in his Dictionary, “any mean production.”81 He was also not shy in using the street name’s other meaning; a “grub,” ­after all, was the larva of an insect. Critics over the years have suggested that the central question of Gulliver’s Travels is “what sort of animal man, as a species, ­really is.”82 While many critics champion Swift’s attacks against rationalism, ­others, like Muri, note that Swift belongs to an intellectual class whose “moral authority relied upon differentiating lower-­order mechanic intellect from higher-­order ner­vous intellect.” While Swift was putting down the Laputans for their allergies to the “Vulgar,” he was also putting down the “gross corporeality” of mechanical l­abor, not unlike how the Houyhnhnm treated the Yahoos.83 His meta­phors of vermin—­grubs for hack writers, flies for coded objects, and spiders for spinning and weaving—­associate early forms of machine thinking with a certain kind of animal: creepy, crawly reckoners. For Swift, ­t hese technologized animals are useful figures via which an authorial subject can abject mechanical or commercial pro­cesses from their intellectual ­labor. But while Swift’s use of reckoning vermin as meme might be aimed at modern knowledge production, it also reveals (and contributes to) one strategy through which certain kinds of industrial ­labor are dehumanized. When scholars of posthumanism look to this era, they discuss how technology was used to define “the ­human,” who can innovate and invent, against “the animal,” which cannot. The liberal ­human subject was (and is, as scholars have recently made quite clear) in a crisis—in a state of flux, redefined from moment to moment, and tied to the plasticization of ­others against which that subject is defined.84 That “other” has alternately been defined as irrational, as uncivilized, even as untechnologized in cases where the use of informational technologies distances the educated subject from the manual laborer. At the same time, the ­things of technology threatened the autonomy of ­human thinking and, in the case of punch-­card systems, their thinking entirely. As  N. Katherine Hayles points out, machine encroachment into eighteenth-­century knowledge formation also presented a new challenge: the idea that “the h ­ uman” was becoming a posthuman subject, “a

74

Z ach a ry M. M a n n

material-­informational entity whose bound­aries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.”85 When mechanical inventions destabilized the distinctions between h ­ umans and nonhuman l­abor (as well as between h ­ umans and other ­humans), p ­ eople in privileged positions used discursive practices like science and lit­er­a­ture to render their own category the exception: in this case, by constructing some forms of humanity (i.e., the reckoning author) further along the spectrum ­toward animality, as menial and automatic. In Man a Machine, La Mettrie writes, “Man was trained like an animal. . . . ​He became an author in the same way as he became a porter.”86 Perhaps instead, as ­England mechanized its ­labor force in the eigh­teenth ­century, he became an author the same way he became a stocking-­weaver—­subjected into rather than trained for an industry that was further becoming a machine itself. Efforts to define categories such as “the author” as separate from this technologization have historically demoted machines to the status of mere tools. Swift is d ­ oing something e­ lse; by privileging the tools of composition in his satires of modern knowledge making, Swift is forced to reclaim the purely ­human author-­inventor by other means. One way he does so, it seems, is to borrow from the well-­rehearsed method described ­earlier, to define h ­ uman subjectivity, again, against not only nonhuman mammals or so-­called uncivilized ­others but ­t hose tiny creatures whose be­hav­ior and low-­ level cognition resemble the automatic qualities of the ­century’s proliferating machines. Thus, scholars must look past the contradictions of Swift’s “rational man” and reconsider the eighteenth-­century author as a figure embedded in a world where engines both spin wool from colonies and churn out poetry—­who, like Swift, must occasionally take the spider’s point of view.

notes 1.  Swift includes in his satire all learned socie­ties. This line of scholarship goes back to the eigh­teenth ­century; the Earl of Orrery claimed that part 3 was “in general written against chymists, mathematicians, mechanics, and projectors of all kinds.” See John Boyle, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, ed. Joao Froes (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 184. 2.  Marjorie Nicolson and Nore M. Mohler, “The Scientific Background of Swift’s Voyage to Laputa,” Annals of Science 2, no. 3 (1937): 301. 3.  Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Albert J. Rivero (New York: Norton, 2002), 154. 4.  Isaac Newton, “Author’s Preface to the Reader,” in The Principia: Mathematical Princi­ples of Natu­ral Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, assisted by Julia Budenz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 382. 5. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Prob­lems of Knowledge in the Science of  Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 97; Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985), 22. 6.  Tita Chico, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 11. Chico’s reading is part of a general impulse to re-­adopt Swift as a prophet of science. Eric A. Weiss discusses Swift in computing history in “Anecdotes: Jonathan Swift’s Computing Invention,” Annals of the History of Computing 7, no. 2 (1985): 164. John McKenny proposes Swift as an early inventor of algorithms in “Swift’s Prescience: A Polite Precursor of Corpus Linguistics,” Journal of Language and Lit­er­a­ture 2, no. 1 (2003): 48.

G u l l i v e r’s T r av e l s a n d t h e r e c k o n i n g au t h o r

75

7.  Gregory Lynall, Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics, and Theology of Natu­ral Knowledge, 1690–1730 (New York: Springer, 2012), 13. 8.  Other books printed for Benjamin Motte include A New Theory of the Earth, from Its Original, to the Consummation of all ­Things by William Whiston, which claims to prove that the Bible’s take on creation is “perfectly agreeable to Reason and Philosophy,” and another by Andrew Motte, a mathe­matics lecture given at Gresham College titled A Treatise of the Mechanical Powers, Wherein the Laws of Motions, and the Properties of ­Those Powers Are Explain’d and Demonstrated in an Easy and Familiar Method (London: Motte, 1733), examined at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, July 2019. 9.  Allison Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the ­Human Machine, 1660–1830 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 101, 118; Simon Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” in The Sciences in Enlightened Eu­rope, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 126–127. 10.  Jennifer L. Lieberman, “Finding a Place for Technology,” JLS: Journal of Lit­er­a­ture and Science 10, no. 1 (2017): 27. 11.  Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” 128. Vaucanson parlayed renown across Eu­rope for his theatrical automata into an appointment as the inspector of France’s national silk trade. In that role he designed automatic silk-­weaving machinery using the rotating barrels that he first designed for his automata. Edmund Cartwright claims to have in­ven­ted his power loom ­after hearing about a chess-­playing automaton. Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in ­Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835), 229. 12.  Barbara Hahn, Technology in the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 2–6; Gillian Cookson, The Age of Machinery: Engineering the Industrial Revolution, 1770–1850 (Suffolk, UK: Boydell, 2018), 226. Cookson writes that the textile industry was “curiously slow in adopting its own technology,” and only a small percentage of innovations ­were ever patented. See also Trevor Griffiths, Philip A. Hunt, and Patrick K. O’Brien, “Inventive Activity in the British Textile Industry, 1700–1800,” Journal of Economic History 52, no. 4 (1992): 882; Richard J. ­Sullivan, “Patent Counts and Textile Invention: A Comment on Griffiths, Hunt, and O’Brien,” Journal of Economic History 55, no. 3 (1995): 666; and Robert C. Allen, “The Industrial Revolution in Miniature: The Spinning Jenny in Britain, France, and India,” Journal of Economic History 69, no. 4 (2009): 903–904. Meanwhile, rumors had long circulated of automated looms in other countries. For instance, Thomas Powell, in Humane Industry; or, A History of the Manual Arts, Deducing the Original, Pro­gress, and Improvement of Them (London, 1661), tells the story of an invention in Poland that weaved “4 or 5 Webs at a time without any humane help; it was an Automaton or Engine that moved of itself and would work night and day.” See Marjorie Hope Nicolson and David Stuart Rodes, introduction to The Virtuoso by Thomas Shadwell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), xxvn. 13.  Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 119. 14.  The Statute of Anne (1710) granted authors fourteen years of “sole right and liberty of printing,” a term limit ­later reinforced by Donaldson v. Becket (1774). As William Blackstone observed, t­ hese term limits “appear to have been copied from the exception in the Statute of Monopolies . . . ​which allows a royal patent of privilege to be granted for fourteen years to any inventor of a new manufacture.” See Blackstone, The Oxford Edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of E ­ ngland: Book II: Of the Rights of ­Things (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 405–407. 15. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 29, 45, 22, 76. 16.  OED Online, s.vv. “stocking-­weaver,” “stocking-­frame” (Oxford: Oxford University Press), https://­w ww​.­oed​.c­ om. 17.  Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Re­nais­sance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London: Routledge, 2007), 4–6. 18. Hahn, Technology in the Industrial Revolution, 69. Cookson suggests that Lee’s invention would have been “totemic” to readers as a symbol of l­abor’s new social reor­ga­ni­za­tion (The Age of Machinery, 8–9). 19. Cookson, The Age of Machinery, 5–13.

76

Z ach a ry M. M a n n

20. Hahn, Technology in the Industrial Revolution, 155; David T. Jenkins, The Cambridge History of Western Textiles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 723. 21. The 1702 Derby mill was originally founded by Thomas Cotchett and driven by a waterwheel built by George Sorocold. This mill quickly failed, but it inspired Thomas and John Lombe’s more successful mill at the same location. The Lombes, using improvements on silk throwing observed in Italy, opened the new mill in 1718 with Sorocold as engineer. This latter mill, which was five stories tall and employed over three hundred workers, is far more famous than the original, having been written about by Daniel Defoe in 1724 in A Tour through the Whole Island of G ­ reat Britain, ed. Pat Rod­gers (London: Penguin, 2005), 72–73, and by John Theo­philus Desaguliers, assistant to Newton and frequent contributor to the Philosophical Transactions, in A Course of Experimental Philosophy, vol. 1 (London: W. Innys, 1745), 69. 22. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 141. 23. Lynall, Swift and Science, 10. 24. Cookson, The Age of Machinery, 16–19; Hahn, Technology in the Industrial Revolution, 58–62. 25.  Letters discussed ­here include “A proposal for the universal use of Irish manufacture” (1720); “The pre­sent miserable state of Ireland” (1726), in which Swift describes Ireland’s plight to Sir Robert Walpole; and “A Letter to the Archbishop of Dublin, concerning the Weavers” (1729). Th ­ ese letters w ­ ere examined at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, July 2019. 26. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 66. 27. Lynall, Swift and Science, 110. The “key” referenced is Corolini di Marco’s The Flying Island, &c. Being a Key to Gulliver’s Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnag, and Japan (London: Edmund Curll, 1726). 28. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 153. 29. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 153. 30.  Ellen Harlizius-­K luck, “Weaving as Binary Art and the Algebra of Patterns,” TEXTILE 15, no.  2 (2017): 180. The technical descriptions of ­these looms is recorded inconsistently across eras. Harlizius-­K luck highlights moments when histories disagree. 31.  Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” 144. 32. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 52, 86, 112. 33.  Ibid., 114. 34.  Ibid., 154–155. 35.  Jonathan Swift, The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, DD . . . ​with Notes, Historical and Critical, ed. Thomas Sheridan and John Nichols, vol. 3 (London: J. Johnson, 1808), 267. 36.  Joseph Drury, Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 27, 85. 37.  Matthew L. Jones, Reckoning with ­Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 59, 142. 38.  Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence (Natick, MA: A.  K. Peters, 1979), 317n11, 37 (Rabelais and Bacon quotes). McCorduck points to Llull rings but also the North African zairja, Chinese I-­Ching, and other inventions by Pope Sylvester II, Leone Battista Alberti, and Georg Philipp Harsdorfer (9–10, 37). 39. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 154. 40.  Ibid., 158. 41.  Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, to Which Is Added The B ­ attle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, 2nd ed., ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 125–126. 42. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 234. 43. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 155. 44.  See Johannah Rod­gers, “The Genealogy of an Image, or, What Does Lit­er­a­ture (Not) Have to Do with the History of Computing? Tracing the Sources and Reception of Gulliver’s ‘Knowledge Engine,’ ” Humanities 6, no. 85 (2017): 2.

G u l l i v e r’s T r av e l s a n d t h e r e c k o n i n g au t h o r

77

45.  John Hughes, The Spectator, no. 220 (November 12, 1711), ed. Richard Steele, in The Spectator, vol. 3., ed. George A. Aitken (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898), 246– 248. Hughes also relates Peter’s proj­ect to John Napier’s Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio (1614). 46.  Matthew Jones writes that the classical rhetorical tradition, still prevalent in the eigh­ teenth ­century, predicated creativity on “the putting together of previously existing ideas in novel, but not entirely original, forms” (Reckoning with M ­ atter, 227–229). Lynall points out, however, that Swift’s attacks on the printing industry often describe how “hack authors infus[e] their own crude productions with plagiarized material” (Swift and Science, 6–7). 47.  Alexander Pope, The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., in Verse and Prose: Containing the Principal Notes of Drs. Warburton and Warton, ed. William Lisle Bowles, William Warburton, and Joseph Warton, vol. 6 (London: J. Johnson, 1806), 251–253. 48. Brad Pasanek and Chad Wellmon, “The Enlightenment Index,” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 56, no. 3 (2015): 361. See also Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass, “Mediating Information, 1450–1800,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William  B. Warner (­Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 140; Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: About Cards & Cata­logs, 1548–1929, trans. Peter Krapp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 54. 49.  Pasanek and Wellmon, “Enlightenment Index.” Samuel Johnson used slips to compose A Dictionary of the En­glish Language (1755). William Smellie cut and pasted from existing works to compile the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1768–1771). 50.  Kelly Swartz, “The Maxims of Swift’s Psychological Fiction,” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 30, no. 1 (2017): 12. 51. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 96. 52. Krajewski, Paper Machines, 53–57. 53.  The diagram of Swift’s engine was first used in the second edition of Gulliver’s Travels, published by Benjamin Motte in 1726. ­There is no attribution. 54. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 154. 55.  The letter, sent in 1736, is quoted in Paddy Bullard and James McLaverty, introduction to Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-­Century Book, ed. Paddy Bullard and James ­McLaverty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 19. 56. Hughes, The Spectator, 248. 57. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 154–155. 58.  Ibid., 52–53. 59. Drury, Novel Machines, 25–26. The works mentioned ­were published between 1760 and 1780. 60. Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg, 148. 61. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 269, 101. 62. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 155. 63. Mark Rose, Authors and ­ Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: ­Harvard University Press, 1993), 34, 72–74. The quote is from Baron James Eyre, in Cases of the Appellants and Respondents, regarding Donaldson v. Becket (1774). 64.  Karl Marx famously flips this construction on its head in Capital when he calls John Milton an “unproductive worker” in the composition of Paradise Lost, whereas “a writer who turns out work for his publisher in factory style is a productive worker.” Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 768n, quoted in Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” 131. 65. Jones, Reckoning with ­Matter, 99, 8, 34. 66.  Joanna Stalnaker, Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 15. See also Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” 126. 67. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 229. 68.  Allen, “The Industrial Revolution in Miniature,” 920. 69. Desaguliers, A Course of Experimental Philosophy, 69. 70. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 137. 71. Jones, Reckoning with ­Matter, 17, 217.

78

Z ach a ry M. M a n n

72. Stalnaker, Unfinished Enlightenment, 110n26. See also Schaffer, “Enlightened Auto­ mata,” 129. 73.  Rod­gers, “The Genealogy of an Image,” 4–6. 74. Hughes, The Spectator, 248. 75. Pope, The Works of Alexander Pope, 260. 76. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 154. 77. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 269. 78.  Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767 (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1980), 182–183; Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” 129. 79. Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg, 142. 80.  Allen, “The Industrial Revolution in Miniature,” 904. 81.  Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the En­glish Language: In Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, Explained in Their Dif­fer­ent Meanings, and Authorized by the Names of Writers in Whose Works They are Found, ed. Alexander Chal­mers (London: C. and J. Rivington, 1824), 329. 82.  R. S. Crane, “The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the History of Ideas,” in Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600–1800, ed. J.  A. Mazzeo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 232. 83. Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg, 142. 84.  Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 5–9. Weheliye, building on Sylvia Winter’s and Hortense Spillers’s pretense that science is often a social text, argues that ­there are many dif­fer­ent, constructed definitions of “the ­human,” as well as many discursive super-­and subhumans, generated by one’s positionality in regard to animality, machines, or racial norms. See also Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming H ­ uman: ­Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 23–24. Jackson adds that the liberal ­human was not necessarily defined against the animal but against non-­European forms of rational humanism and that the figure of the animal was used to not to dehumanize but to bestially humanize certain ­humans in order to cast them as rational in the wrong way. In this essay I similarly treat the category of ­human thinking as moldable by the ­people in power. 85.  N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Lit­er­ a­ture, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3. 86.  Julien Offray de La Mettrie, La Mettrie: Machine Man and Other Writings, ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13.

chapter 5

•

Designing the Enlightenment Anthropocene Kevin MacDonnell

On April 28, 1784, James Watt acquired a patent for design improvements to the steam engine.1 This was not the first patent that Watt and his partner, Matthew Boulton, had been issued for their work on the steam engine, nor would it be the last. It would, however, be the most impactful. E ­ arlier steam engines had been used primarily to pump ­water out of mines, but the series of improvements that culminated in the 1784 patent converted the machine into a power source that could impel other machinery, a development that would position the engine as the prime mover of Britain’s emerging industrial apparatus. Dating back to Karl Marx’s claim that industrial cap­i­tal­ist production originates in “the patent that [Watt] took out in April 1784,” the historical significance of this document has not been understated.2 Marx’s designation of the patent as the starting point of industrial capitalism has more recently been ­adopted by scientists and humanists attempting to pinpoint the onset of the Anthropocene, a term coined by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the ecologist Eugene Stoermer to denote the current geological epoch in which humanity acts as a geophysical force.3 And following Crutzen and Stoermer’s assertion that the Anthropocene begins with the invention of Watt’s 1784 model, the environmental phi­los­o­pher Timothy Morton went a step further, saying, “We can be uncannily precise about the date on which the world ended. . . . ​ It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon into Earth’s crust.”4 Proponents of an eighteenth-­ century Anthropocene, then, implicitly contend that it is the diagrammatic expression of the steam engine’s design—­and not the onset of large-­scale fossil fuel consumption—­that triggers a fundamental shift in the relationship between ­humans and the natu­ral world.5 That such epochal change has been attributed to the publication of a patent rather than, say, the installation of t­ hese technologies suggestively foregrounds the role of design in producing the material conditions of the Anthropocene. Patents are, first and foremost, ­legal documents. But they can also mark the arrival of an 79

80

K ev i n M acD on n e l l

idea or concept as a discursive actor, often representing their first articulation in the public sphere. This is certainly the case with Watt’s improvements to the steam engine. Although it would be de­cades before the machine became ubiquitous in British manufacturing, its key design features w ­ ere codified in the 1784 patent. As such, the very notion of an eighteenth-­century Anthropocene places eighteenth-­ century intellectual culture firmly at the center of modern environmental history. Or as Alan Mikhail argues in his essay “Enlightenment Anthropocene,” the ­contemporaneity of an eighteenth-­century Anthropocene and a major intellectual movement like the Enlightenment is a “coincidence” that necessitates greater investment in efforts to understand the latter’s role in producing the former.6 This chapter seeks to answer Mikhail’s call. In what follows I unpack the sociocultural contexts out of which Watt designed the 1784 patent, which can in turn amplify the conceptual foundations subtending industrial capitalism and the Anthropocene. The key features introduced in the patent, I argue, extend on the artisanal theory of design spearheaded by the publication of William Hogarth’s aesthetic treatise The Analy­sis of Beauty (1753). I focus my analy­sis on how Hogarthian aesthetic and epistemological commitments informed the most impor­tant addition to the 1784 patent, an innovative mechanism known as “Watt’s linkage,” the introduction of which established the steam engine as what Marx calls “an agent universally applicable in industry” (figure 5.1).7 Designed to synthesize the linear motion of the engine’s piston rod and the curvilinear motion of its working beam, Watt’s linkage allowed the steam engine to produce a steady supply of mechanical force by translating t­ hese competing trajectories into what would become the machine’s signature reciprocating flow. The linkage achieved this synthesis by tracing an undulating line that one nineteenth-­ century historian of the steam engine characterized as “a species of S-­curve.”8 I contend that the distinctive S-­curve generated by Watt’s linkage is born out of the same epistemological foundations that underpin the serpentine “line of beauty,” the aesthetic princi­ple at the heart of Hogarth’s philosophy of design. While the morphological affinity between the two is striking, their superficial resemblance means ­little in itself. The serpentine figures expressed by Watt’s linkage and Hogarth’s line of beauty are, more importantly, representative manifestations of a shared philosophy of design that constituted aesthetic and technological production amid Britain’s industrial transition. During the second half of the eigh­teenth ­century, the serpentine line emerged as a potent symbol of artisanal efforts to navigate the limitations of classical geometrical design. Euclidean geometry had long been employed as the dominant conceptual framework for both the fine arts and mechanical arts, but its dependence on metaphysical abstractions as the grounds for design came ­under assault as British epistemology became increasingly committed to empirical analy­sis throughout the period.9 The precipitous rise of empiricism brought with it a set of design practices that privileged material application over abstract formulation. If the straight line and the circle reflect the ideal figures of classical geometry, then the serpentine line embodies something wholly dif­fer­ent, capturing the organic

Figure 5.1. ​Sketch of Watt’s linkage, James Watt to Matthew Boulton (1784). Reprinted from The Selected Papers of Boulton and Watt, vol. 1, The Engine Partnership, 1775–1825 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981).

82

K ev i n M acD on n e l l

fluidity that constitutes material form. This turn t­oward more empirical design practices that is reflected in the irregular form of the S-­curve proved critical to the success of industrialization efforts. By attending to material rather than metaphysical notions of formal design, engineers like Watt and artists like Hogarth ­were able to effectively harness a natu­ral world that exceeded linear calculation. Given the position of the steam engine within the historiography of the Anthropocene, my discussion of the shared princi­ples of design found in Watt’s linkage and Hogarth’s line of beauty inevitably complicates the legacies of the latter. If it is indeed the diagrammatic expression of t­ hese design princi­ples that marks the onset of the Anthropocene, then it follows that their manifestation in con­temporary aesthetic forms played a part in the sociocultural transformation that accompanied this new geological epoch. However, lest we too quickly indict eighteenth-­century aesthetic philosophy for aiding and abetting the onset of the Anthropocene, I conclude this chapter by considering the application of t­ hese design princi­ples in ways that undermine the instrumental logic of the industrial era. To do so, I examine Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), a text that identifies itself as a “machine” and does not shy away from its indebtedness to Hogarthian aesthetics and whose serpentine narrative offers an alternative iteration of the innovation in question. By centering my inquiry around a set of common practices applied within engineering, art, and lit­er­a­ture, I therefore track the role of Enlightenment-­era design not only in shaping and expressing the Anthropocene’s dominant modes of knowing and making but also in challenging their implementation. The serpentine style had been incorporated into artistic practice dating back to the Renaissance-­era figura serpentinata, but it was during the ­middle de­cades of the eigh­teenth ­century that the undulating S-­curve ­rose to prominence within Britain’s arts establishment, assuming a central position in the artisanal design practices that opposed the abstract conventions of high art.10 Up u ­ ntil midcentury, architectural and artistic design had largely conformed to the neoclassical theory formalized by Francis Hutcheson and Lord Shaftesbury, who equated “the Beautiful” with the ideal figures of classical geometry.11 The formal integrity that Hutcheson ascribes to hexagons, octagons, or decagons, for instance, is derived from their correspondence to conceptual figurations explic­itly divorced from material real­ity. Straight lines and perfect circles do not, ­after all, appear in nature. This unnatural quality of geometrical form stood out as a testament to the brilliance of ­human artifice, with the straight line appearing as what Tim Ingold describes as “an index of the triumph of rational, purposeful design over the vicissitudes of the natu­ral world.”12 Significantly, the basis for such thinking was decidedly abstract, centralizing metaphysical form as the grounds for aesthetic design. The subsequent resurgence of the serpentine style occurred in response to this glowing appraisal of classical geometrical form within high art. W.J.T. Mitchell concedes that the S-­curve is itself a geometrical figure—­a member of the vortex ­family—­t hough he is quick to note that its divergence from “pure” geometrical forms like the straight line and circle in late eighteenth-­century aesthetic and mathematical theory is “emblematic of the historic shift from classic to modern geom-

Design i ng the En lightenm en t A n thropocen e

83

etry.”13 Whereas Britain’s early eighteenth-­century aes­the­ti­cians endorsed the regularity of straight lines and circles, ­t hose who worked in more artisanal fields like furniture and landscape design began to “show,” in William Shenstone’s words, “to the pupils of Design, / The triumphs of the waving line.”14 The figure initially appeared as a central component of the rococo style imported from France around midcentury, vis­i­ble in the Rocaille’s utilization of serpentine lines to portray what Siegfried Giedion calls the “meeting of reason with the richness of organic form.”15 The serpentine style ultimately achieved influence within British aesthetics in landscape and garden design, the prac­ti­tion­ers of which sought to imitate the flexibility of natu­ral form as a counterbalance to the stifling formality of neoclassicism. This contrast is evident in the work of William Kent, whose approach to landscape design stems from the position that “Nature abhors a straight line,” even as his contributions to architecture adopt the linear Palladian style.16 Likewise, the asymmetrical S-­curve was notably a preferred feature in the elaborate gardens designed by Capability Brown, whose use of the serpentine style was widely ­adopted by his contemporaries and successors throughout the eigh­teenth c­ entury.17 ­After initially gaining traction in the domain of landscape architecture, the serpentine line would receive its most elaborate theorization as a design princi­ple in Hogarth’s The Analy­sis of Beauty, in which the waving “line of beauty” is declared to be the cornerstone feature of aesthetic value (figure 5.2). Conceived by Hogarth as a challenge to the precision of academic design theory, he crafts a system of design around the line of beauty, to which, as he has it, “all mathematical schemes are foreign.”18 A fundamentally empirical treatise, the Analy­sis rejects the geometrical aesthetics of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson on the basis of Hogarth’s observation of the striking dissonance between the mathematical calculability of neoclassical design and the “variety” and “intricacy” of form that has a “real foundation in nature” (33).19 Hogarth, who posits the ­human body as the quin­tes­sen­ tial figure of “native beauty,” recognizes that the body does not align with neoclassical conventions: “no exact mathematical mea­sure­ment by lines can be given for the true proportions of a ­human body” (39). Moreover, attempts to contort the body to “mimic such very straight or round motions” would be “incompatible with the ­human form” and “therefore ridicu­lous” (106). Individual body parts like bones and organs might be rigid or visually unappealing, but Hogarth contends that our “elastic skin” connects ­these components into a smooth, curving body (56). Michael Baridon has argued that the scientific associations with Hogarth’s use of “elastic” h ­ ere inherently challenge the “omnipotence” of geometry, “for the expansible character of gases made it impossible to represent them by geometric shapes.”20 From gaseous substances to ­human bodies, empirical inquiry was revealing the surrounding world to be fluid and amorphous, leading Hogarth to suspect that con­temporary design was hampered by a fundamental misapprehension of real­ity. Or as Baridon says, “Geometrical figures ­were too rigid to express the flexibility of living forms.”21 Hogarth’s argument in the Analy­sis follows from this insight, as he goes on to articulate a system of design that is attuned to the elasticity of nature rather than the “mean lines” of abstract forms (106).

Figure 5.2. ​Frontispiece from William Hogarth’s The Analy­sis of Beauty (London, 1753). Courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Library.

Design i ng the En lightenm en t A n thropocen e

85

Although Hogarth’s critique is primarily directed at the fine arts, his diagnosis of the misguided commitment to such abstractions extends to his views on the mechanical and industrial arts as well. Hogarth’s perspective on technological design can be gleaned from the work of one of his disciples, Jean Andre Rouquet, whose The Pre­sent State of the Arts in E ­ ngland (1755) has been treated as a recapitulation of the artist’s own views.22 Based on his examination of the production methods used within skilled l­abor enterprises ranging from painting and architecture to silk manufacture and steel work, Rouquet’s treatise concludes that the En­g lish, while valuing design, w ­ ere hampered by a “geometrical rigour” that restricts the potential of material production.23 This approach, Rouquet argues, “must surely contribute to the improvement of our reason: but every­t hing may be abused; we may reason too much; thence may be too vain, and come to despise every­t hing that does not appear exactly reasonable.”24 Machines and instruments built according to strict mathematical laws thus reflect, for both Rouquet and ­Ho­garth, a fundamental incommensurability with the material world. In the Analy­sis, clockwork mechanisms like John Harrison’s chronometer and Jacques Vaucanson’s mechanical duck are characterized as “confused” and “displeasingly ­shaped” ­because of the unnatural movement of their rigid components (62). ­These machines, like the geometrical figures endorsed by Hutcheson, achieve their desired ends yet fail to consolidate their internal motion into the fluid regularity found in nature. Hogarth’s vocal critique of con­temporary technology notwithstanding, he does not go so far as to claim that the arts could not construct a figure with both graceful motion and practical application—­“variety” and “fitness”—­only that within Britain’s con­temporary regime of material production, they largely had not. Hogarth’s primary aim in the Analy­sis, then, is to cultivate the design princi­ples that could be employed to build such “machines.” In response to Hogarth’s dissatisfaction with the geometrical straitjacket of con­ temporary design, he conceives the line of beauty as a technique that posits “variety” of motion as the founding princi­ple of material production. The basis of his valuation of the line of beauty lay in its application outside the strictures of geometrical form, appearing instead as a founding example of what Scott MacKenzie calls the “post-­classicist line” that was “no longer determined and explicable, a priori by geometrical princi­ple.”25 Whereas motion had long been taken as a direct product of linear composition, Hogarth flips the script and identifies linear form as a by-­product of motion. On the basis of this assumption, he offers the continuous undulating motion of the line of beauty as the central component of aesthetic beauty. By forcing the viewer’s eye to physically mimic the reciprocating trajectory of an S-­curve, the line of beauty appeals to the mind’s “love of pursuit” by “lead[ing] the eye a wanton kind of chace, and from the plea­sure that gives the mind, intitles it to the name of beautiful” (33). As such, the line of beauty challenges the systematicity of geometrical design by mobilizing the indeterminacy of empirical real­ity, representing an aesthetics that is, as Timothy Erwin describes it, “obstinately of this world.”26

86

K ev i n M acD on n e l l

Hogarth’s attention to variety, however, does not come at the cost of legibility. Conceding that “variety uncomposed, and without design, is confusion and deformity,” he advocates for a “composed variety” that is embodied in the line of beauty’s irregular S-­curve (28). Proper design requires a degree of uniformity to accompany variety, so rather than letting variety run amok, “Simplicity is call’d in to restrain its superfluities” (39). The line of beauty, a figure composed of any “two curves contrasted,” appears at the intersection of classical and modern geometrical form, representing for Hogarth the mediation of the regularity of artifice and the elasticity of experience (42). This mediating quality is invoked by Ronald Paulson, who describes the artist’s approach to design as a “­middle way,” sitting firmly “between the static Beautiful of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson and the uncontrollable chaos of the Sublime.”27 Echoing Paulson, Mitchell refers to Hogarth’s “balancing of antithetical values,” while Frédéric Ogée describes the line of beauty as “halfway between abstinence and excess, between the rigid straight line of dogmatism and the excessively curved line of hedonism.”28 This strategic retention of discipline to balance—or, as Paulson says, “regulate”—­t he flexible nature of material real­ity is where Hogarth most radically diverges from his pre­de­ces­sors and what gives the line of beauty its distinctive character.29 Despite Hogarth’s own conflicting attitudes ­toward the mechanical arts, the design princi­ples he establishes in the Analy­sis ­were received warmly among craftsmen.30 In fact, the relegation of the Analy­sis to mere “art theory” is more a historiographical misconception based on Hogarth’s success as a painter than an accurate appraisal of the text. That Hogarth saw the wider application of his design theory is evident in his decision to send a copy of the Analy­sis to the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific institution, along with his rejection of the line of beauty’s association with objects that are “no way applied, nor of any manner of use, but merely to entertain the eye” (60). Unlike the serpentine lines used within rococo aesthetics, Hogarth’s line of beauty “covered much more territory,” emerging as a general-­purpose princi­ple of material production that could be a­ dopted by mechanics as well as paint­ers.31 Indeed, long a­ fter Romantic treatises on aesthetics had supplanted Hogarth’s work, the line of beauty remained a useful design princi­ple within nineteenth-­century engineering. An 1833 issue of Mechanics Magazine, for instance, invokes the line of beauty as evidence of the superior design of the latest stagecoach model. Unlike older models, the axle in t­ hese new stagecoaches implements a “return curve (Hogarth’s line of beauty),” which “is a tolerable evidence that the builders are not totally ignorant of the rules by which beauty is produced.”32 Likewise, in an account of the Brougham and Lowther steam locomotives, the British railway writer C. Hamilton Ellis describes the “sweep” of the engine’s cylinder as “that Line of Beauty and Grace which Hogarth drew on the palette of his self-­portrait in 1745.”33 The line of beauty’s versatility in this re­spect can be attributed to what Ruth Mack identifies as Hogarth’s “practical aesthetics.” Having “straddled the role of artist and artisan for his entire ­career,” Hogarth derives his theory of design from “the artisanal domain of habitual action,” grounding his notions of form, function, and beauty in practice.34 Although the scholarly

Design i ng the En lightenm en t A n thropocen e

87

conversation regarding the line of beauty’s application has largely been restricted to its use as a princi­ple of artistic production, reading Hogarth artisanally, as Mack does, allows us to re­orient the line of beauty in relation to con­temporary developments in technological design. Considered as a feature of technological as well as aesthetic design, the line of beauty’s manipulation of empirical real­ity reflects the governing logic of modern technology, as defined by Martin Heidegger. The “revealing” of essence that “holds sway” in modern technology occurs through what Heidegger calls a “challenging,” which means “to call forth” or “to demand positively.”35 Whereas a Dutch windmill’s ability to perform work is passively “left entirely to the wind’s blowing,” a hydroelectric plant “sets upon” a river by appropriating its energetic potential and then directing it ­toward something ­else.36 Pre-­industrial machines, like Vaucanson’s clockwork duck, operate irrespective of existing physical forms, manifesting themselves as material repre­sen­ta­t ions of strictly abstract princi­ples. “Modern” technology, on the other hand, departs from its pre­de­ces­sors by actively exploiting the material world. In this sense, the line of beauty behaves like a feature of modern technology, manipulating the intricate world of experience—­empirical real­ity—to construct culturally legible forms. If employed properly, or “artfully,” argues Hogarth, the line of beauty has the ability to “set native beauty off to more advantage” (39). Its mediating or regulatory approach to design attends to the unwieldy variety of nature and strategically formalizes this quality rather than surrendering to it. Insofar as the line of beauty approaches empirical real­ity as a dynamic force that can be molded into a coherent figure, the system of design that Hogarth lays out participates in the same ­will to regulate or control nature that has come to define technology in the Anthropocene. Dif­fer­ent in degree only, the extraction and assimilation that characterizes technological activity in the Anthropocene is visibly at work in Hogarth’s articulation of the line of beauty. This is certainly not to say that the art created by Hogarth or inspired by the Analy­sis is any way responsible for the environmental destruction brought about by industrial capitalism amid the Anthropocene. I am, however, suggesting that the cultivation and reification of strategies and practices within the realm of the aesthetic should be accounted for in any analy­sis of the conceptual foundations of the Anthropocene. It is against the backdrop of Hogarth’s ranging influence on design that we can situate the steam engine that Watt patented in 1784, itself one of Heidegger’s core examples of modern technology and a machine whose invention has been directly tied to the onset of industrial capitalism and the Anthropocene. Like Hogarth, Watt was successor to a mathematical system of design founded on the abstract princi­ ples of Euclidean geometry. Watt, moreover, similarly responds to the inherent constraints of this framework by adopting a serpentine motion into the mechanism at the center of the 1784 patent, a technical feature that reflects his own empirical approach to design. ­W hether Watt was directly familiar with Hogarth’s work is not only unclear but ultimately outside the scope of this study. It is rather my aim to identify their shared approaches to design as “open techniques,” a term that Liliane

88

K ev i n M acD on n e l l

Hilaire-­Perez and other historians of technology have used to describe the skilled practices that both technical and nontechnical actors develop and circulate throughout society. “The techniques of production,” Hilaire-­Perez and Catherine Verna point out, “­were not only of interest to producers, but also to merchants, shop­keep­ers, artists, consumers, local authorities, princes, po­liti­cal writers, and ­others. Thus the actors involved in technical dissemination should not be l­ imited to the technicians.”37 Visual culture emerged as an impor­tant site for such interchange, offering techniques and technologies that could be used by artists and engineers alike. Pamela Smith tracks this interdisciplinary application of visual culture back to the use of images in early modern science, arguing that artists and artisans “helped constitute the aims and methods” of empirical scientific inquiry.38 Nor is Smith alone in this regard. Eileen Reeves and Dániel Margócsy, among ­others, have offered similar assessments of the relationship between visual culture and technoscience, presenting compelling evidence of the reciprocal influence that ­these knowledge systems have had on each other.39 Following the emergence of the public sphere but before the erection of firm disciplinary bound­aries, eighteenth-­ century Britain’s knowledge culture was well suited to foster such conceptual transmission. The serpentine motion that appeared as an open technique at this time can thus be positioned as a shared strategy for responding to similar epistemological challenges faced across the fine arts and mechanical arts. In the de­cades that followed the invention of the steam engine, it shuttled into popu­lar consciousness as an object whose allure extended beyond technicians and manufacturers. The dissemination of the machine initiated what Ben Russell calls a “new machine aesthetic,” in which the steam engine came to exert “a continued imaginative effect on ­t hose who saw it work.”40 Within modern scholarship, the aesthetic quality of the steam engine has typically been discussed in t­ hese terms, as a phenomenon that proceeds from, rather than informing, the machine’s design.41 The aestheticized perceptions of the steam engine, according to such accounts, merely extend from its function, engendered by the recognition of how ser­viceable the machine could be to cap­i­tal­ist production. But while ­these analyses deliver impor­tant insights into how nineteenth-­century aesthetics was s­haped by the invention of the steam engine, they do not consider how the steam engine may have been ­shaped by eighteenth-­century aesthetics. As Russell reminds us, “The engine was as much a cultural machine as a scientific one,” and it is therefore imperative that we remain attentive to the discursive formations embedded within its design.42 The groundbreaking design improvement at the center of the 1784 patent appeared in the form of a diagram for the unassuming mechanical contraption that became known as “Watt’s linkage” (figure  5.3).43 The unimpeded reciprocating motion generated by the linkage could be used to power any machine driven by a wheel, providing a source of mechanical force more reliable and consistent than animals, wind, or w ­ ater. Two years prior, Watt had taken out a patent for the sun-­ and-­planet gears—­a device attached to the flywheel that drove the piston both up and down, making the engine “double-­acting”—­which had begun the pro­cess of bringing the engine out of the mine and into the factory. But without the addition of

Design i ng the En lightenm en t A n thropocen e

89

Figure 5.3. ​Sketch of Watt’s linkage, James Watt to his son, James Watt Jr. (1808). Reprinted from Franz Reaulaux, The Kinematics of Machinery: Outlines of a Theory of Machines, ed. and trans. Alex B. W. Kennedy (London: Macmillan, 1876).

the linkage introduced in 1784, the engine’s signature reciprocating motion would remain imperfect, severely delimiting the machine’s maximum output and prohibiting its use as a prime mover.44 Watt’s linkage worked by incorporating a flexible joint that could accommodate both the angular motion of the working beam and the perpendicular motion of the piston. The joint was composed by a three-­bar linkage that connected the two contrasting motions and converted them into a unified reciprocating motion. According to Helmut Müller-­Sievers, synthesizing “translation” (straight-­line motion) and “rotation” (circular motion) into a singular motion had long been considered a contradictory proposition within Western metaphysics. Watt’s linkage, however, “forced a compromise between rotation and translation.”45 The mechanism achieved this compromise by attaching parallel bars to both the piston rod and working beam that would each trace a curvilinear line and then connecting ­these with a third bar. This third bar converted the two semicircles into an undulating line that produced the linkage’s signature S-­curve. The serpentine line traced by Watt’s linkage emerged as the central feature of the machine’s aforementioned aesthetic appeal. In an address to the French Académie des sciences, François Arago’s technical description of the steam engine devolves into aesthetic admiration when he arrives at the linkage: “At each reciprocation of the stroke, it opens and closes, with the smoothness—­I had almost said with the grace,—­which charms us in the gestures of an accomplished actor.”46 While technological design is often considered antithetical to aesthetic taste, the “grace” of the linkage’s motion leads Arago to position the steam engine as evidence of his stated belief that “the useful arts may often exhibit the same beauty and greatness which are displayed in the fine.”47 Boulton and Watt clearly recognized the hypnotic appeal of the engine’s smooth reciprocating motion, taking advantage of this effect by showcasing the first of ­these models in prominent London locations where it would be vis­i­ble to the public.48 ­After witnessing the mechanism in motion for the first

90

K ev i n M acD on n e l l

time, Watt remarked to Boulton on his “surprise at the perfection of its action”: “in looking at it for the first time, I had all the plea­sure of novelty which could have arisen had it been in­ven­ted by another person.”49 Though Watt’s suggestion ­here is prob­ably a rhetorical flourish, the steam engine’s application of the reciprocating flow of the S-­curve to power Britain’s industrial transition is nevertheless notable given its well-­ established position within eighteenth-­ century aesthetic discourse. In addition to the morphological affinity between Hogarth’s line of beauty and Watt’s linkage, Watt arrives at the serpentine line by way of the same challenge to con­temporary design practices that had catalyzed its appearance elsewhere. His linkage would revolutionize manufacturing in the coming de­cades, but more immediately, it signaled a departure from the “geometrical rigour” that Rouquet had diagnosed within the arts. As Michel Serres notes in his account of the major conceptual paradigms before and ­after the Industrial Revolution, Euclidean geometry influenced the direction of pre-­industrial technological design as much as it had informed pre-­industrial aesthetic philosophy. As a result, the force generated by pre-­industrial machines was taken to correspond directly to “their form, their lines, their geometry.”50 The world of machines before the Industrial Revolution was, in other words, “a world that is drawn, drawable. It is a world in which chains trace motion.”51 ­Until the 1780s, steam-­engine design had reflected this prevailing logic, producing l­imited force through the machine’s assemblage of geometrical components and thus wasting most of the energy produced in the engine’s boiler. So entrenched was this approach to mechanical design that Watt’s stated intent to replace the rigid contraptions used in ­earlier engines with the flexible linkage he devised was initially received by Boulton as “quite incomprehensible.”52 Watt’s challenge to this system came in the linkage he patented in 1784, which attended to the “elastic force” of steam into the machine’s technical design.53 Against the prevailing “mechanical” theory of heat, Watt and his mentor, Joseph Black, had devised a “chemical” theory that conceived of heat as a substance that combined with other substances. On the basis of this theory, Watt concluded that steam was an “elastic fluid” that expanded when combined with heat. Such expansion, though, would “not follow a Geometrical progression,” leading Watt to opt for a flexible linkage that accommodated steam’s bounding movement.54 Though the mechanism itself was rigid, composed of three metal rods, the “bewildering variety” of its serpentine motion could not be charted “algebraically or in any other form of abstraction.”55 Its motion was consistent but exceeded linear calculation. Watt’s linkage thus successfully mediated the engine’s rigid mechanical princi­ples and steam’s elasticity, manifesting in the mechanism’s trademark serpentine motion. While his ­earlier improvements had effectively contained and redirected steam power, the unbroken reciprocating motion produced by the 1784 linkage allowed steam’s expansive princi­ple to produce a level of force that exceeded the limits of the machine’s linear components. As such, the design of the linkage reflects the “irreducible empiricism and pragmatism” under­lying Watt’s work on the steam engine, a feature that is embodied in the mechanism’s winding S-­curve.56

Design i ng the En lightenm en t A n thropocen e

91

My aim thus far has been to contextualize the “species” of motion produced by Watt’s linkage by situating it in relation to the serpentine style articulated within Enlightenment-­era aesthetic discourse. The shared epistemological foundations of ­t hese artifacts of eighteenth-­century design do, however, complicate the historical legacies of Hogarthian design. What, exactly, happens to our understanding of eighteenth-­century aesthetics once we locate its design princi­ples within the discursive and material formations responsible for initiating industrial capitalism and, by extension, the Anthropocene? Jesse Oak Taylor has tackled this question as it pertains to the “rise of the novel,” a literary-­historical phenomenon that “dovetails” with the onset of industrialization, an alignment, he argues, that is “not coincidental, but constitutive.”57 As he explains, the novel’s repre­sen­ta­tional conventions, which centralize the individual h ­ uman subject against a static environment, are built on dangerous anthropocentric notions of command over the natu­ral world. Accordingly, he concludes, “The novel form is at once a product and a participant in the social, historic, economic, and ecological forces responsible for bringing the Holocene to an end.”58 Having identified the genre’s problematic role in this regard, Taylor contends that alternative repre­sen­ta­tional forms are needed to undermine the governing logics of the Anthropocene.59 But before I condemn the Analy­sis on similar grounds for advancing techniques that would be replicated by the engines of industrialism, it is impor­tant to briefly consider the manifestation of t­ hese princi­ples in a slightly dif­fer­ent context. To do so, I would like to conclude by turning h ­ ere to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a text whose frequent appraisal of itself as a Hogarthian “machine” represents an alternative response to the limits of geometrical design heretofore not considered. Writing in the wake of the highly systematic approaches to language issued by David Hartley, Robert Hooke, and numerous early novelists, Sterne perceived con­ temporary repre­sen­ta­tional frameworks to be fundamentally at odds with the limitless variety of experience.60 To paint a full picture of a “life,” as Tristram Shandy attempts to do, exposes the limits of such enterprises. Tristram grapples with the inherent challenges of linear repre­sen­ta­tion when his attempt to recount the day of his birth, which is frequently sidetracked by a number of contextual and conversational digressions, takes over a year: “at this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write—­It must follow, an’ please your worships, that the more I write, the more I ­shall have to write. . . . ​I ­shall never overtake myself.”61 This is ­a fter taking two chapters to recount “what passed in ­going down one pair of stairs.”62 Experience is presented ­here and elsewhere in the text in “elastic” terms, with each moment possessing the capacity to expand into any number of back­ stories or digressions. “To write a linear narrative is morally impossible for Tristram,” argues Joseph Drury, “­because to do so requires placing abusive constraints on h ­ uman nature.”63 Plotting Tristram’s life within a linear narrative structure would, Sterne admits, necessitate the elimination of the text’s digressions, which are “the sunshine—­t hey are the life, the soul of reading.”64 He therefore sets out to assem­ ble a text that incorporates as central structural components the asides, tangents, and digressions that constitute experience.

92

K ev i n M acD on n e l l

Sterne embraces the unpredictable variety of experience in this regard, but he does not abandon linearity altogether. Rather, his adoption of Hogarth’s princi­ ples of design appear in the very mechanism of the narrative, which embodies the line of beauty’s “composed variety.” In this sense, the novel is presented not as an undifferentiated collection of digressions but as a well-­oiled “machine” that mediates or “reconcile[s]” the “contrary motions” of linear narrative and elastic experience into something of a serpentine trajectory. “In a word,” Shandy summarizes, “the machinery of my work . . . ​is digressive, and it is progressive too,—­and at the same time.”65 The degree to which he accomplishes this mediation is illustrated in the impossibility of distinguishing between linear and nonlinear moments in the text, even, as Victor Shklovsky points out, in the scenes that seem overtly digressive: “Sterne’s inset material does not play a merely peripheral role in the novel. On the contrary, e­ very passage belongs to one of the novel’s compositional lines.”66 Christina Lupton has argued that the ability to recognize the novel’s digressions as digressions requires that Sterne “first posits his work as a book,” citing the linear succession of text in the material book as a precondition for Tristram Shandy’s nonlinear appearance.67 The text’s repre­sen­ta­tion of the variety of experience is, in other words, dependent on a certain degree of regulation and control, most evident in the si­mul­ta­neously linear and nonlinear plotlines Sterne provides at the end of the fifth volume. Even as Tristram facetiously scolds himself ­here for failing to tell any part of the story “in a tolerable straight line,” his comments throughout the novel imply that he was very much pleased with the mediation of progressive and digressive ele­ments reflected in ­t hese irregular lines.68 Not only does the form of the novel reflect this mediation of linear and nonlinear ele­ments; so, too, does the composition of the Shandy f­ amily.69 In order for Tristram to illustrate his claim that Shandy-­hall constitutes a “complex” rather than a “­simple machine,” he describes its inner workings as resembling “the inside of a Dutch silk-­mill.” He explains this comparison by referring to the “parallel” forms of “motion, debate, harangue, dialogue, proj­ect, or dissertation” that occur si­mul­ ta­neously in the ­house’s separate quarters and remain interconnected by way of “the rule to leave the door, not absolutely shut, but somewhat a-­jar.” This rule is enabled by “the covert of the bad hinge, (and that possibly might be one of the many reasons why it was never mended).” Information travels back and forth through the cracked door, which was “wide enough, for all that, to carry . . . ​t his windward trade,” keeping the residents of Shandy-­hall on the same page. Though the ­house­hold is composed of a range of actors who are “contrasted by nature and education,” the door hinge mediates their incommensurable “motions,” synthesizing ­these perspectives into a single collective experience. Sterne uses the death of Bobby Shandy to illustrate how this “family-­machine” worked, presenting the dif­fer­ent ways in which the Shandys and their servants pro­cess the tragic news as it circulates across ­either side of the open door. As Walter’s address to the parlor attempts to rationalize the loss by recounting a linear history of the philosophical interpretation of death, “proceeding from period to period, by meta­phor and allusion,” Trim provides a less structured and more emotional response to the tragedy. His

Design i ng the En lightenm en t A n thropocen e

93

oration in the kitchen is “without wit or antithesis, or point, or turn, this way or that; but leaving the images on one side, and the pictures on the other, g­ oing straight forwards as nature could lead him, to the heart.” Sterne’s depiction of the “complex” Shandy family-­machine ­here implies that Bobby’s death could only be conceptually approached by balancing ­these alternative forms of expression, requiring neither Walter’s rigid log­os nor Trim’s disjointed pathos alone. Some combination of the two, however, mediated by the mechanical hinge between them, begins to register the immensity of such an experience.70 Sterne’s use of the language of machinery to stage his critique of the limits of repre­sen­ta­tion speaks to the common structural limitations faced by mechanical production and artistic repre­sen­ta­tion alike. That Sterne packages the novel as a “machine” is often read meta­phor­ically, but Drury usefully points out that during the eigh­teenth ­century, “the novel was understood to be a kind of technology.” As a result, “critical reflection on its uses and effects was necessarily implicated in con­ temporary discourses about the uses and effects of the Enlightenment’s other machines.”71 As such, pulling apart Sterne’s ideas concerning the limitations of narrative from ­t hose about technological design writ large becomes impossible. And while Roy Caldwell has argued that Sterne’s machine “belongs not to the ­family of modern industrial machinery, but is rather the heir of the archaic machines of the seventeenth ­century,” the text’s incorporation of the stochastic power of digression as the source of its literal and figurative motion is distinctly modern.72 Unlike the rigid mechanisms constructed by Sterne’s contemporaries in the domains of literary and technological production, Tristram Shandy mediates linear progression and nonlinear digression to generate his machine’s motive force. The ­middle way that the text inhabits aligns Sterne’s proj­ect with t­ hose techniques employed by Hogarth and Watt insofar as it attempts to practically negotiate the systematizing nature of design with the elastic quality of empirical real­ity.73 The novel, however, puts t­ hese mediating techniques to very dif­fer­ent ends, conceiving of itself as a machine that, while certainly functional, does not actually do or create anything. The novel is rather, as Yorick announces in the text’s closing line, but “a cock and a bull.”74 Take the aforementioned door hinge, which importantly performs its mediating role by not working properly. Though classified as a “bad hinge,” its dysfunction as a ­simple machine proves to be critical to its function as part of Sterne’s complex machine. The hinge, in other words, acquires its value outside of the par­ameters of conventional technological design, operating irrespective of the rules established within that system. Moreover, the family-­machine made pos­si­ble by this broken machine does not itself function in a way that could be deemed “productive” or “progressive.” The circulation of the news of Bobby’s passing between the parlor and the kitchen, while allowing the characters on ­either side of the cracked door to begin pro­cessing the death in their own ways, nevertheless culminates in a miscommunication between Walter and Mrs. Shandy. Standing outside the door, Mrs. Shandy m ­ istakes Walter’s recitation of Socrates’s statement “I have friends—­I have relations,—­I have three desolate ­children” as an admission of infidelity, prompting her to charge into the parlor to confront her husband.

94

K ev i n M acD on n e l l —­Then, cried my m ­ other, opening the door,—­you have one more, Mr. Shandy, than I know of. By heaven! I have one less,—­said my f­ather, getting up and walking out of the room.75

Rather than facilitating clear communication between the separate rooms in the ­house, the door hinge ­here obstructs communication. By concluding the account of Bobby’s death with such a farcical denouement, Sterne reveals the “complex” machine that is Shandy-­hall to be inherently unproductive. Though capable of mediating the characters’ contrary “motions” into a generative collectivity—­ Mrs. Shandy is eventually informed of her son’s death—in the end, the family-­ machine only generates a comical moment of misunderstanding. Against the instrumental turn that defined technological development within Enlightenment Britain, Sterne imagines the novel to be a perfect machine that cannot be incorporated into con­temporary systems of production.76 His text-­machine thus comes to function as an antimachine, effectively mobilizing the elastic quality of empirical real­ity, but to no end that would be deemed “productive.” Tristram Shandy si­mul­ta­neously replicates and disavows the conceptual schema it had ­adopted from con­temporary design, offering a compelling instance of Enlightenment self-­critique. Consider for a moment the account of Trim’s failed attempts to tell Toby “The story of the king of Bohemia and his seven c­ astles.” ­Every time Trim begins, Toby interjects with an irrelevant question or comment, resulting in a temporary digression away from the story. Trim begins the story from scratch five times, each beginning represented by an interruption in the text itself: “The story of the king of Bohemia and his seven ­castles, continued.”77 With ­every new attempt, Toby finds a way to derail what is presumably Trim’s conventionally linear story. Sterne includes scenes like this as a way to maintain his formal balance between digression and progression, reinforcing their mediation in the text by repeatedly proceeding with the story, only to return each time to the beginning. Th ­ ere is no product or payoff produced by Sterne’s machine h ­ ere; rather, the value lies simply in witnessing its motion. The de-­instrumentalization of Hogarth’s princi­ples achieved in Sterne’s text-­ machine suggests that such techniques are not inherently exploitative, nor must they necessarily be abandoned to challenge the conceptual under­pinnings of industrial capitalism and the Anthropocene. The decline of classical geometry within aesthetics and engineering ushered in a way of knowing and making that replaced abstractions with empirical real­ity as its animating subject, yet the emanations of this new epistemological paradigm differed greatly across the fine arts and industrial arts, if not in theory than in application. According to Gilbert Simondon, the often-­nefarious re­orientation of technical practices is a common, if not constitutive, occurrence in the history of technology. “­There appears to be a singular law of transformation of ­human thought,” he argues, “according to which any ethical, technical, and scientific invention, which sets out as a means of liberation and rediscovery of man, becomes through its historical evolution an instrument that

Design i ng the En lightenm en t A n thropocen e

95

turns against its liberation and enslaves man by limiting him.”78 Eighteenth-­century design theory did not set out to develop skilled practices and techniques that could be exploited by bourgeois manufacturers. ­These individuals w ­ ere merely responding to a rigid conceptual framework by attending to the capacities of empirical real­ ity in their efforts to cultivate practical knowledge. As Siegfried Giedion reminds us, “Mechanization is neutral. What ­matters is how one uses mechanization.” 79 That industrial capitalism would repurpose the contributions of eighteenth-­century aesthetic discourse is clear, but this pro­cess would not be absolute. Despite the violent legacies of industrial technologies like Watt’s steam engine, the discursive formations embedded within such machines remained per­sis­tently malleable, capable of disrupting the very systems they constituted.

notes 1.  James Watt, Fire and Steam Engines, &c., U.K. Patent 1432, issued April 28, 1784. 2.  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 499. 3.  Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’ ” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. The specific dating of the Anthropocene has, of course, become a major point of ­contention among humanists and social scientists. For further discussion of the Anthropocene starting date, see Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 41–68; Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, The ­Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); Christophe ­Bonneuil, “The Geological Turn: Narratives of the Anthropocene,” in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, ed. Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015), 17–31; J.  R.  McNeill and Peter Engelke, The ­Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Bruce D. Smith and Melinda A. Zeder, “The Onset of the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene 4 (2013): 8–13. 4. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecol­ogy ­after the End of the World (­Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 7. 5.  Marxist historiography has operated on similar assumptions. G. A. Cohen, for example, identifies the locus of industrial cap­i­tal­ist society in “technical knowledge” above and beyond the physical embodiment of the machine itself. As Cohen argues, “Destroy all steam engines but preserve knowledge of how to make and use them and, with a bit of luck in the ­matter of raw materials, you can soon return to the status quo ante. Destroy the knowledge and preserve the engine and you have a useless ensemble of metal, a material surd, a relic of the ­f uture.” Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2000), 41. 6.  Alan Mikhail, “Enlightenment Anthropocene,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 49, no.  2 (Winter 2016), 211–231. 7. Marx, Capital, 499. 8.  John Bourne, A Treatise on the Steam Engine in Its Application to Mines, Mills, Steam Navigation, and Railways (London, 1846), 211. 9.  See Bonnie Blackwell, “The Pleasures of Geometry: Math and Melancholia in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Helóïse,” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 15, no. 1 (March 2004): 89–112; Laura Søvsø Thomasen and Henrik Kragh Sørensen, “The Irony of Romantic Mathe­matics: Bridging the Historiographies of Lit­er­at­ure and Mathe­matics,” Configurations 24, no.  1 (Winter 2016): 53–70; Matthew Wickman, Lit­er­a­ture ­after Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long Scottish Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 10.  For more on the history of the serpentine line, see James Bunn, Wave Forms: A Natu­ ral Syntax for Rhythmic Language (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Miranda Stanyon, “Serpentine Sighs: De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis and the Serpentine Line,”

96

K ev i n M acD on n e l l

Studies in Romanticism 53, no.  1 (Spring 2014): 31–58; David Summers, “Maniera and Movement: The Figura Serpentinata,” Art Quarterly 35 (1972): 269–273. 11.  See Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1726). For a discussion of the mathematical nature of the “Shaftesbury-­Hutcheson Beautiful,” see Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, vol. 3, Art and Politics, 1750–1764 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 65–76. 12.  Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), 152. 13. W.J.T. Mitchell, Articulate Images: The S­ister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson (­Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 127. 14.  William Shenstone, “Verses Written in the Garden of William Shenstone, Esq.,” in The Poetical Works of William Shenstone, vol. 1 (London, 1780), 58. 15. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 312. 16.  Quoted in Ingold, Lines, 159. 17.  See Tom Turner, En­glish Garden Design: History and Styles since 1650 (Suffolk, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1986). 18.  William Hogarth, The Analy­sis of Beauty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 65; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 19.  See Rosamaria Loretelli, “The Aesthetics of Empiricism and the Origin of the Novel,” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 41, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 83–109. 20.  Michel Baridon, “Hogarth’s ‘Living Machines of Nature’ and the Theorisation of Aesthetics,” in Hogarth: Representing Nature’s Machines, ed. David Bindman, Frédéric Ogée, and Peter Wagner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 92. 21.  Ibid., 94. 22.  For a discussion of Hogarth’s influence on Rouquet, see Paulson, Hogarth, 193–196. 23.  Jean Andre Rouquet, The Pre­sent State of the Arts in ­England (London, 1755), 7. 24.  Ibid., 9. 25.  Scott  R. MacKenzie, “My Chapter upon Lines: Motion, Deviation, and Lineation in Eighteenth-­Century British Aesthetics,” Criticism 61, no. 1 (2019): 6. 26.  Timothy Erwin, “William Hogarth and the Aesthetics of Nationalism,” Huntington Library Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2001): 393. 27. Paulson, Hogarth, 97. 28. Mitchell, Articulate Images, 131; Frédéric Ogée, “From Text to Image: William Hogarth and the Emergence of a Visual Culture in Eighteenth-­Century ­England,” in Bindman, Ogée, and Wagner, Hogarth, 10. 29. Paulson, Hogarth, 73. 30.  See Anne Puetz, “Design Instructions for Artisans in Eighteenth-­Century Britain,” Journal of Design History 12, no. 3 (1999): 217–239. 31. Paulson, Hogarth, 122. 32.  “Defence of Coach-­Building, and a Few Words on Steam-­Carriages,” Mechanics Magazine 18 (1833): 209. 33. Quoted in Ian Car­ter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 264. 34. Ruth Mack, “Hogarth’s Practical Aesthetics,” in Mind, Body, Motion, ­ Matter: Eighteenth-­Century British and French Literary Perspectives, ed. Mary Helen McMurray and Alison Conway (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 22, 29. See also Abigail Zitin, Practical Form: Abstraction, Technique, and Beauty in Eighteenth-­Century Aesthetics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). 35.  Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, ed. and trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 14. 36.  Ibid., 14, 16. 37.  Liliane Hilaire-­Pérez and Catherine Verna, “Dissemination of Technical Knowledge in the ­Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era,” Technology and Culture 47 (July 2006): 539.

Design i ng the En lightenm en t A n thropocen e

97

38.  Pamela H. Smith, “Art, Science, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Eu­rope,” Isis 97 (March 2006): 95. See also Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 39.  Dániel Margócsy, Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Eileen Reeves, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1997). See also Anita Guerrini, The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and H ­ umans in Louis XIV’s Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Harold J. Cook, ­Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 40.  Ben Russell, James Watt: Making the World Anew (London: Reaktion, 2014), 197, 201. 41.  See Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984), 41–44; Tamara S. Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Lit­er­a­ture and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (­London: Verso, 2016), 194–222; Anson Rabinbach, The ­Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Russell, James Watt, 170–202. 42. Russell, James Watt, 9. 43.  I refer to Watt’s linkage and the parallel motion device he developed shortly ­after the 1784 patent was issued interchangeably throughout. The parallel motion device used the exact same mechanism that we see in the 1784 patent, but it added a fourth bar to the contraption to save space. 44.  For more on the technical history of Watt’s linkage, see Ben Marsden, Watt’s Perfect Engine: Steam and the Age of Invention (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); James Patrick Muirhead, The Origin and Pro­gress of the Mechanical Inventions of James Watt (­London: John Murray, 1854); William Rosen, The Most Power­ful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention (New York: Random House, 2010). 45.  Helmut Müller-­Sievers, The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth ­Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 43. 46.  François Arago, Historical Eloge of James Watt, trans. James Patrick Muirhead (London: John Murray, 1839), 85. 47.  Ibid., 214. 48. Russell, James Watt, 167. 49.  Robert Stuart, A Descriptive History of the Steam Engine (London: Knight and Lacey, 1824), 190–191. 50. Michel Serres, “Turner Translates Carnot,” in Hermes: Lit­er­a­ture, Science, Philosophy, ed. and trans. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 56. 51.  Ibid., 56. 52.  Matthew Boulton to James Watt, July  17, 1784, Boulton and Watt Collection, MS 3147/3/8/10, Library of Birmingham, UK. 53.  Watt, Fire and Steam Engines, &c. 54.  Quoted in David Philip Miller, James Watt, Chemist: Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 97. 55.  Müller-­Sievers, The Cylinder, 29. 56. Ibid. 57.  Jesse Oak Taylor, “The Novel a­ fter Nature, Nature a­ fter the Novel: Richard Jefferies’s Anthropocene Romance,” Studies in the Novel 50, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 110. 58. Ibid. 59. ­Others have offered similar arguments about the ineptitude of traditional literary genres in responding to the ongoing environmental crisis. See Amitav Ghosh, The ­Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Ursula K. Heise, “Lost Dogs, Last Birds, and Listed Species: Cultures of Extinction,” Configurations 18, nos. 1–2 (Winter 2010): 49–72; Stephanie LeMenager, “Climate Change and

98

K ev i n M acD on n e l l

the Strug­g le for Genre,” in Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, ed.  Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 220–238. 60.  See Rebecca Tierney-­Hynes, “Fictional Mechanics: Haywood, Reading, and the Passions,” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 51, nos. 1–2 (Spring–­Summer 2010): 153–172. 61.  Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a Gentleman (London: Penguin, 2003), 257. 62.  Ibid., 253. 63.  Joseph Drury, Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 138. 64. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 64. 65.  Ibid., 63–64. 66. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1990), 165. 67.  Christina Lupton, “Contingency, Codex, the Eighteenth-­Century Novel,” ELH 81, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 1180. See also Eric Rothstein, Systems of Order and Inquiry in ­Later Eighteenth-­ Century Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). 68. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 425. 69.  For a discussion of the competing repre­sen­t a­t ional systems depicted in the Shandy ­house­hold, see Alex Solomon, “The Novel and the Bowling Green: Toby Shandy’s Diagrammatic Realism,” Philological Quarterly 95, no. 2 (2016): 269–291. 70. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 323–324. 71. Drury, Novel Machines, 4. 72.  Roy  C. Caldwell, “Tristram Shandy, Bachelor Machine,” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 34, no.  2 (Summer 1993): 106. See also Judith Hawley, “Tristram Shandy, Learned Wit, and Enlightenment Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, ed. Thomas Keymer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 34–48. 73.  See also Peter Conrad, Shandyism: The Character of Romantic Irony (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978); Martin Meisel, Chaos ­Imagined: Lit­e r­a­ture, Art, Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 307–309. 74. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 588. 75.  Ibid., 334. 76.  See Paul Slack, The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Pro­gress in Seventeenth-­Century ­England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 77. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 510. 78.  Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017), 18. 79. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 345.

chapter 6

•

Technology, Temporality, and Queer Form in Horace Walpole’s Gothic Emily M. West

In A Description of the Villa . . . ​at Strawberry-­Hill, Horace Walpole guides readers through his faux-­medieval gothic mansion and its collections in a virtual version of the tours visitors could take through his home. Entering the building in person or in text, such visitors encounter a curious light: “You first enter a small gloomy hall paved with hexagon tyles, and lighted by two narrow win­dows of painted glass, representing St. John and St. Francis. This hall is united with the staircase, and both are hung with gothic paper. . . . ​In the well of the staircase, by a cord of black and yellow, hangs a gothic lanthorn of tin japanned, designed by Mr. Bentley, and filled with painted glass; the door of it has an old pane with the arms of Vere earl of Oxford.”1 From its position in the stairwell, this gothic lantern produced the signature effect of Strawberry Hill’s “venerable barbarism”: the “gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals” that Walpole cultivated in his home.2 Illuminating (barely) the space that Walpole named “the most par­tic­u ­lar and chief beauty of the c­ astle”—­a space that served as the staging ground for the dream that inspired The ­Castle of Otranto—­the light created its gothic atmosphere (see figures 6.1–6.4).3 The Description of the Villa . . . ​at Strawberry-­Hill and its tour of the home that Walpole called “a paper Fabric” suggest how textual and material forms collaborate to produce the gothic genre and its effects.4 In this chapter, I explore one aspect of that collaboration by analyzing Strawberry Hill’s lantern as a gothic technology. Through its operation, the lantern materializes gothic forms, and attending to its materiality offers new insight on how ­t hose forms remade normative models of temporality and sexuality across Walpole’s multidisciplinary work. Indeed, a key claim of this essay is that temporality and sexuality are inextricably bound together in Walpole’s gothic. ­Here my argument builds on foundational queer theoretical analyses of Walpole’s work (by George Haggerty, Jill 99

Figure 6.1. ​The “gothic lanthorn” (ca. 1753–1755), designed by Horace Walpole and Richard Bentley and constructed by William Hallett. The lantern is currently held by the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, where it hangs in the executive director’s office. A replica of the lantern hangs in its original position at Strawberry Hill. Image courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

T e c h n o l o g y, T e m p o r a l i t y, a n d Q u e e r F o r m

101

Figure 6.2. ​The lantern in operation in the executive director’s office at the Lewis Walpole Library. Photo by the author.

Campbell, Matthew Reeve, and o ­ thers) by using queer temporality as my primary framework. Drawing on the queer theories of time articulated by scholars such as Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, and Lee Edelman, I show how Walpole’s irreverently critical treatment of both linear historicity and the heterosexual f­ amily act as linked disruptions of what Halberstam names the “time of inheritance”: a conceptual structure in which the heteropatriarchal f­amily unit organizes a linear model of history and futurity and through which normative systems are endlessly reproduced.5 By “stepping out of the linearity of straight time,” Walpole’s gothic ultimately (and unexpectedly) enacts the kind of queer methodology of hope detailed by José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia.6 As part of this methodology, the lantern materializes the formal aesthetics of explosion, fragmentation, mingling, and remaking that likewise shape Walpole’s gothic antimarriage plots in The ­Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious ­Mother. Further, as a technology of queer time, the lantern revises the way that technological objects ­were called on across the eigh­teenth ­century to manifest Enlightenment modernity as a progression from the superseded past. By generating

102

E m i ly M . W e s t

Figure 6.3. ​The replica lantern in operation at Strawberry Hill. Photo by the author.

gloomth instead of enlightenment, Walpole’s gothic technology suggests other ways of making a f­ uture. To think about how that ­future is materialized, I begin with the gothic lantern’s material form. Walpole expands the account he gives of the light in the Description in a letter to his friend George Montagu: “I have filled Mr Bentley’s Gothic lanthorn with painted glass, which casts the most venerable gloom on the stairs that was ever seen since the days of Abelard. The lanthorn itself in which I have stuck a coat of the Veres is supposed to have come from ­Castle Henningham.”7 The painted glass came from the assortment that Walpole had amassed as one of ­England’s earliest and most avid collectors of decorative glass.8 The largest part of his collection was early modern and Dutch, but it also included “medieval armorials, shields, and badges,” Tudor artifacts, and newly commissioned pieces.9 The lantern, like Strawberry Hill’s other assemblages of decorative glass, combined pieces from ­t hese disparate locations and historical periods with “eclectic abandon,” but in Walpole’s descriptions of the fixture, he consistently and uncharacteristically highlights the Vere f­amily coat of arms incorporated into its collaged arrangement (see figures  6.5 and 6.6).10 The Veres had been of interest to Walpole since he visited their estate at Hanworth and ancestral c­ astle at Hedingham (which he called Henningham) in the 1740s and, declaring himself “Vere-­ mad,” threw himself into researching the ­family’s genealogy.11 This was a history that stretched back to the Norman invasion: Aubrey de Vere, who established Hedingham, was granted his title and lands by William the Conqueror. Thomas

Figure 6.4. ​Richard Bentley, “Perspective of the Hall & Staircase at Strawberryhill,” from Drawings and Designs by Richd. Bentley, Lewis Walpole Library, folio 49 3585, leaf 30a. This image looks down on the hall from a partial ascent of the staircase. The lantern, not included in this illustration, hung in the ­middle of this space. Image courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Figure 6.5. ​Photo­graph of the gothic lantern showing the side in which the Vere coat of arms is inserted. Image courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Figure 6.6. ​George Perfect Harding, “The Lanthron [sic] in the Red Hall,” an unfinished drawing of the gothic lantern in which only the Vere arms are distinguished among the pieces of stained and painted glass. From Thomas Kirgate’s extra-­i llustrated copy of A Description of the Villa . . . ​at Strawberry Hill, Lewis Walpole Library, quarto 33 30, copy 6. Image courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

106

E m i ly M . W e s t

Babington Macaulay, in his epochal Whig history of ­England, names the Veres “the longest and most illustrious line of nobles that E ­ ngland has seen.”12 Hedingham was likewise, as its eighteenth-­century tenant Lewis Majendie declared, “a structure of no common note, having been the chief residence annext to an estate belonging by grant from the Conqueror to the very antient and noble f­ amily of De Vere, Earls of Oxford; in which the f­amily remained, from t­hose early times, almost without interruption, till the year 1655.”13 The Vere f­ amily and ­castle are, in t­ hese accounts, living monuments of En­glish history. The Vere lineage thus makes obvious the entanglement of f­ amily and state histories and ­futures, since the continuation of this ­family line is inseparable from the social reproduction of En­glishness itself. This mode of entanglement has been analyzed by theorists of queer time, who trace how normative forms of temporality and sexuality are linked. Elizabeth Freeman, for example, explains how “the state and other institutions, including repre­sen­ta­tional apparatuses, link properly temporalized bodies” to “teleological schemes of events or strategies for living such as marriage, accumulation of health and wealth for the ­f uture, reproduction,” and “childrearing.”14 Through ­t hese schemes, bodies are “bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation,” and the ­f uture is, Lee Edelman has argued, i­ magined genealogically through the figure of the child who ­will inherit and reproduce them in turn.15 Jack Halberstam shows how “inheritance” thus transcends the function of individual property transfer to become a figure for the “collective legacy from which a group ­will draw a properly po­liti­cal ­f uture” along national and racial lines. Inheritance as a form organizes a “generational time within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through ­family ties from one generation to the next,” connecting “the f­amily to the historical past of the nation, and . . . ​t he ­f uture of both familial and national stability.”16 The Vere genealogy organizes the time of inheritance by articulating a long, illustrious line promising the perpetual continuation of a national futurity conceptualized and realized through heterosexual forms. This is, I argue, both why Walpole was so fascinated with the f­ amily’s legacy and why he remade that legacy in key ways. One such method of remaking was textual, comprising accounts that puncture that legacy, as in this letter to Montagu: I have been to make a visit of two or three days to Nugent, and was carried to see the last remains of the glory of the old Aubrey de Veres, Earls of Oxford. They ­were once masters of almost this entire county, but quite reduced even before the extinction of their h ­ ouse; the last Earl’s son died at a miserable cottage that I was shown at a distance, and I think another of the s­ isters, besides Lady Mary Vere, was forced to live upon her beauty. Henningham C ­ astle, where Harry the Seventh was so sumptuously banqueted and imposed that villainous fine for his entertainment, is now shrunk to one vast ruinous tower.17

Whereas Macaulay and Majendie emphasize dynastic glory, Walpole foregrounds decay and extinction, his account narrating the ruin of ­family and seat. It is this ruin that makes available to Walpole a piece of the Veres’ remains in the form of

T e c h n o l o g y, T e m p o r a l i t y, a n d Q u e e r F o r m

107

the lantern, a fictional artifact from Hedingham that may or may not contain an ­actual fragment of stained glass from the ­castle. Rather than the veracity or provenance of the painted Vere coat of arms, what is most relevant h ­ ere is how the glass pane’s form interrupts the time of inheritance through its vis­i­ble dislocation and fragmentation of the ­family’s legacy. The formal logic that enables the fragment’s appropriation in the lantern is familiar from Walpole’s gothic fictions: that of explosion. Explosion is introduced in Walpole’s literary work through its relationship to time and genre: The C ­ astle of Otranto’s first preface (written to introduce the book to the public as a medieval story recovered from “the library of an ancient Catholic f­ amily in the north of ­England”) pre-­emptively atones for the book’s excesses with an “apology” for its inclusion of “Miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events” that “are exploded now even from romances.”18 The preface ­here employs a familiar timescale of development in which past forms are “rejected, discontinued” and “held in contempt” as part of a progression ­toward a rational and enlightened ­future.19 Depending on your critical perspective, Walpole’s attempt to “wind up the [reader’s] feelings . . . ​till they [become] for a moment identified with ­t hose of a ruder age” ­either reinforces or rejects this timescale.20 Regardless, such gothic encounters with the past must inevitably negotiate the injunction to “Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are En­glish, that we are Christians.”21 What interests me h ­ ere is the way that exploded forms in Otranto link t­ hese national timescales to their necessary realization through the heterosexual ­family. This link is made in the book’s first pages when Otranto’s tyrannical patriarch, Manfred, sees Conrad—­his sole, infirm male heir—­crushed to death by a heraldic helmet that materializes spectacularly out of time and place. As Walpole narrates, “What a sight for a f­ ather’s eyes!—­He beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried u ­ nder an enormous helmet” (18). In this moment, explosion’s function to “eject” and “cast out” past forms in a progression to futurity meets its material connotations of “burst[ing], shatter[ing], or [breaking] apart violently” in a manner that “typically scatter[s] fragments outwards,”22 as Otranto’s lineal ­f uture is smashed into “bleeding mangled remains” (19) before Conrad can consummate a dynastic marriage. The juxtaposition between exploded narrative and embodied forms staged through Otranto’s preface and opening pages suggests that in Walpole’s gothic what is ejected or cast out are not superseded past forms but instead the ­f uture that a genealogical progression from such forms insists into being. Rather than the line, the operative structure in this queer gothic relation to past and ­f uture is the fragment. The Vere pane, as the dislocated fragment of a shattered dynastic legacy, evinces the same material form and narrative relation to past and ­future that shape Otranto’s dissident temporalities. Reading the gothic lantern alongside Walpole’s gothic texts is generative b ­ ecause it highlights what this explosive, fragmentary relation to past and f­ uture can make, rather than simply what it rejects, interrupts, or destroys. H ­ ere it is helpful to consider both how the lantern was made and what it makes. To begin with its construction, as a centerpiece in Strawberry Hill, the

108

E m i ly M . W e s t

lantern was assembled in the same collective mode as the rest of the ­house. George Haggerty’s and Jill Campbell’s germinal work has traced how Strawberry Hill acted as a locus for Walpole’s intense relations with his closest friends, who became collaborators in this space of fantasy.23 The “more intimate a relationship a friend shared with Walpole,” Haggerty observes, “the more deeply he would implicate that friend in this Gothic product of his imagination.”24 Or, as Eugenia Zuroski has recently put it, “In the Strawberry Hill proj­ect, Walpole contrived a way to dream together with his friends as a ­matter of quotidian practice.”25 This collective of friends replaced the dynastic ­family that such a home conventionally commemorated. The gothic lantern is most directly the product of Walpole’s collaboration with Richard Bentley, with whom he designed the fixture, along with a number of Strawberry Hill’s spaces and artifacts.26 The “japanned” lantern’s chinoiserie ele­ ments mark it as the invention of this intimate relation. During the time of its creation Walpole rejected chinoiserie forms, but Bentley remained enamored of Asian aesthetics and continued to propose their incorporation into Strawberry Hill and other shared proj­ects. ­Because Walpole scorned the mingling of gothic and chinoiserie aesthetics as an “unnatural copulation,” their conjunction in the japanned gothic lantern signals that this object is a collaborative ­t hing: the product of a “practice of intimacy that accommodates difference of taste through assertions of affection.”27 The lantern is visibly the creation of two men’s shared dream. Stained and painted glass also functioned as an intimate site in Walpole’s inner circle, as expressed through the descriptions of Strawberry’s glass shared in his letters and in requests to his friends for more. Walpole writes to Horace Mann a few years before the lantern’s construction that he is giving him a “commission”: “If you can pick me up any fragments of old painted glass, arms or anything, I ­shall be excessively obliged to you.”28 ­These “historic bits,” loosed from ancestral estates, now circulate through and signal the queer forms of relation that made Strawberry Hill.29 Queer forms likewise shape t­ hese fragments’ arrangement in the lantern. Critics have commented on the unruly irreverence that characterizes Walpole’s use of disparate glass pieces throughout Strawberry Hill, the way he “combines them in an almost sacrilegious manner to produce a decorative melange.”30 This discontinuous arrangement recalls the patchwork aesthetic that Alice Tweedy McGrath has analyzed in Jane Barker’s writing as a queer method that resists continuity and closure: as she writes, “Patchwork form is governed by juxtaposition rather than cohesion, patchwork logic by contiguity rather than cause and effect.”31 Complementing the content of a narrative that “depicts illicit desires that thwart the primacy of heterosexual marriage,” Barker’s A Patch-­Work Screen for the Ladies uses a patchwork method to or­ga­nize “stories without reference to the telos of the marriage plot or any other endpoint.”32 Likewise, Walpole’s collaged arrangements of glass include heraldic fragments like the coat of arms in ways that evade restoring the genealogical trajectories that such artifacts are meant to generate, embedding ­t hese pieces instead in antiteleological assemblages.

T e c h n o l o g y, T e m p o r a l i t y, a n d Q u e e r F o r m

109

The discontinuous queer aesthetic that determines the lantern’s construction also structures what it makes: namely, the gloomth produced when the lantern is lit. In its i­ magined place at the Veres’ ancestral seat, the illuminated coat of arms would literalize the concept of lineage by making lustrous “the longest and most illustrious line of nobles that E ­ ngland has seen,” continually casting the Veres forward to a ­f uture conceptualized and materialized through the image of ­family.33 As a repurposed fragment amid an array of other disparate glass pieces in the lantern (a motley collection of religious iconography, natu­ral history, and other heraldic symbols from vari­ous sources), it is instead lit into a haze of colored light, the f­ amily crest mixing promiscuously with the images against which it is juxtaposed. As an optical technology, the lantern exploits stained glass’s formal ambivalence, the way that it functions as “an indiscrete medium”: “Unlike other visual media, which remain within the discrete boundary of their material frames,” Anne F. Harris observes, “stained glass exceeds its materiality” and “dissolve[s] narrative into a kaleidoscopic array.”34 While the heraldic glass is designed to exceed the bounds of its materiality in order to enact the ­family line’s projection into the ­f uture, ­here the image of the Veres instead dissolves into an atmosphere of what Walpole called “conventual gloom.”35 As Matthew Reeve has traced, this “conventual” ambiance is part of the “rich tradition during the eigh­teenth ­century in Protestant ­England that considered Catholicism to be a mode of religious transgression that coded sexual transgression.”36 While Walpole’s evocations of Catholicism skirted the deliberate outrageousness of the “Monks of Medmenham” (a hellfire club that, in the 1750s, performed rituals of sexual debauchery with sex worker “nuns” at Medmenham Abbey),37 “popery” was central to the fantasy he cultivated at Strawberry Hill. He wrote to William Cole that “I like it as I do chivalry and romance. They all furnish one with ideas and visions, which Presbyterianism does not. A Gothic church or convent fill one with romantic dreams.”38 In this letter and elsewhere, Reeve shows, Walpole’s “fantasies inspired by Gothic architecture” are suffused with “an erotic charge.”39 In the lantern that produced “the gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals” in which visitors ­were enveloped on entering Strawberry Hill, the Vere crest dissipates into a nimbus of charged reverie.40 As I suggested ­earlier, what particularly interests me about the lantern and the gloomth it proj­ects are their implications for understanding the gothic’s relationship to the past and the ­future as generative rather than only disruptive or destructive. Of course, explosion (the Walpolean gothic’s method of shattering genealogical relations between past and f­ uture) is clearly crucial to the lantern’s function. Illuminating the entrance to Strawberry Hill, its coat of arms is a fragment not only out of place but also out of the genealogical continuity premised on and realized through that place; the ancestry it casts forth has no continuance except as a sign of its own obsolescence. Like Conrad’s “disfigured corpse” (Otranto, 19), the Vere remains ­here function as an emblem of extinction rather than a legacy. Yet as it refuses the time of inheritance, this gothic technology also makes something: a fantasy materialized in the real world, one constructed from and for

110

E m i ly M . W e s t

queer intimacies. In this way the lantern generates possibility, what Muñoz describes in Cruising Utopia as “the illumination of a horizon of existence,” of “a queerness to come.”41 In that text, Muñoz proposes that “queerness is essentially about the rejection of a h ­ ere and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” and outlines how “we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic,” which “frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-­dawning futurity.”42 To construct and witness such blueprints is to undertake a “queer utopian hermeneutic”: a critical methodology of hope.43 Considered in this light, Walpole’s gothic may not actually be primarily about the past and its relation to the pre­sent but instead, as an aesthetic of queer utopian worldmaking, centrally about the ­f uture; to return to Muñoz, we could read it as “a backward glance that enacts a ­future vision.”44 In this way, though the gothic may seem like the most paranoid of genres,45 we can recognize the gothic lantern’s construction from “historic bits” as an essentially reparative proj­ect: “additive,” “accretive,” a collaborative work of “assembl[ing] and confer[ring] plenitude” on broken relics and remains to illuminate another way forward.46 What, then, of the story Walpole dreamed in this gloomth? The ­Castle of Otranto’s stated moral (introduced in the preface and recalled several times throughout the narrative) warns that “the sins of the f­ather are visited on their c­ hildren to the third and fourth generation” (6), evoking what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the “dogged, defensive narrative stiffness of a paranoid temporality” that “takes its shape from a generational narrative . . . ​ characterized by a distinctly Oedipal regularity and repetitiveness: it happened to my ­father’s ­father, it happened to my ­father, it is happening to me, it ­will happen to my son, and it ­will happen to my son’s son.”47 Yet, as explored ­earlier, forms of generational continuity are mangled from the first page of the text, and throughout the narrative, its gothic episodes elaborate the aesthetics of queer time materialized in Strawberry Hill’s gothic lantern. This is perhaps most obvious in the famous scene in which a portrait in Otranto’s gallery “quit[s] its pannel, and descend[s] on the floor” (25): a moment that refuses linearity in at least three ways. First, the portrait of Manfred’s grand­father Ricardo is meant to demonstrate his descendant’s ancestral claim to Otranto, yet readers l­ ater learn that Ricardo murdered Alfonso, Otranto’s lord, and forged a “fictitious ­will” naming himself as Alfonso’s heir (104). Like the ­will, the painting underpins a false dynastic claim, suggesting both how genealogical forms function primarily to transmit power and property forward along normative lines and how they are ultimately fictions constructed to serve such ends. Further, the panel’s painted surface is restless; like a lit stained-­glass pane, it refuses to “remain within the discrete boundary” of its repre­sen­ta­tional frame. Instead, quitting it—­“exceed[ing] its materiality”48—­the image performs the disruption of lineage and linearity as an ancestor appears out of time and place. Fi­nally, the appearance of the panel in Walpole’s novel is itself an anachronism. As a con­ temporary reviewer noted, “We cannot help thinking that this circumstance is some presumption that the ­castle of Otranto is a modern fabrick; for we doubt w ­ hether 49 pictures ­were fastened in pannels before the year 1243.” As the reviewer suspects, Ricardo’s painting actually references one in the gallery at Strawberry Hill; Walpole

T e c h n o l o g y, T e m p o r a l i t y, a n d Q u e e r F o r m

111

wrote to his friend Cole, “When you read of the picture quitting its panel, did not you recollect the portrait of Lord Falkland all in white in my gallery?”50 Walpole’s insertion of the seventeenth-­century portrait of Falkland in his supposedly medieval story performs the same antilinearity as the fictional portrait’s animation, using a method of juxtaposition and anticontinuity transposed from material to narrative gothic forms. Walpole’s reference to the Falkland portrait also links Otranto’s unsettled ancestor to the ways Walpole deployed picture hangs and gallery walks at Strawberry Hill to articulate the “complex bonds that [he] shared with his homosocial circle,” such that conventional dynastic practices of “collecting, arranging, displaying, and exchanging art” became “a venue for creating queer f­ amily romances” rather than a method of consolidating heteropatriarchal histories and f­ utures.51 The vision of a fragmented and ultimately futureless dynastic line emblematized by Ricardo’s step beyond the historical frame interrupts the time of inheritance but does so in a way that evokes and extends Strawberry Hill’s queer worldmaking. ­These aesthetics of anachronism and antilineage are not confined to Manfred’s illegitimate dynastic line but also characterize Otranto’s legitimate heir, Theodore, who is himself an ancestral portrait roaming beyond the bounds of his frame. Theodore’s “exact resemblance” (51) to “the picture of the good Alfonso in the gallery” (38) is marked by all who are familiar with the painting. Matilda fears that she dreams when she sees him b ­ ecause of it (51); and when Manfred sees Theodore in armor for the first time, he takes him for a “dreadful spectre” (using the same language he applied to Ricardo’s ghost), fi­nally declaring the youth a “ghastly phantom” that “unhinge[s] the soul” (76–77). Theodore, as the “very image” (81) of Alfonso’s portrait, exists as both a material body and an immaterial “shade” (87), at once the living claimant to the “sceptre [Manfred] had received from [his] ancestors” (63) and the “dreadful spectre” of an ancestor out of time (76). ­These descriptions of Theodore as a spectral painted surface merge him with (rather than distinguish him from) Manfred’s illegitimate, extinguished f­amily line, since the same narrative and ­aesthetic forms characterize the manifestations of both ancestries. Extending this enmeshment of the two dynastic lines, Theodore is repeatedly taken by Isabella, Matilda, and Matilda’s maid Bianca for Conrad’s ghost throughout the text, as Jason Farr has pointed out. Farr’s queer disability studies analy­sis shows how this recurring confusion between Theodore and the infirm Conrad enacts an “uncanny crip troubling of the masculine ideal,” and he examines one such instance in which Bianca interprets Theodore’s presence as the ghost of Conrad’s “young tutor, [who] drowned himself,” and “the young Prince’s” ghost “now met in the chamber below.”52 As Farr notes, the fantasy of “ghostly cohabitation in the chamber below is suggestive of a pederastic relationship,” but the episode’s queerness also operates at the level of form: Conrad’s ghost “mingles with that of his deceased tutor” and with Theodore’s living body as distinctions between individual figures dissolve into an atmosphere both haunting and charged with eroticism.53 This dissolution continues across the book, in episodes such as the one in which Theodore’s “­human form” is believed by Isabella to be “the ghost of her betrothed Conrad” (27). With ­these repeated dissolutions of the form meant to proj­ect Otranto’s

112

E m i ly M . W e s t

dynastic line into the ­future, Walpole’s novel deploys the formal strategies that shape Strawberry Hill’s gothic lantern and its operation as a technology of queer time. Just as the lantern’s stained-­glass collage “dissolve[s] narrative into a kaleidoscopic array,” Theodore merges with his haunting double, blurring the genealogical line that he is supposed to materialize.54 And, though Theodore closes the narrative by assuming his position as “the true prince of Otranto” and Isabella’s husband, Otranto’s ending refuses to resolve into heterosexual futurity. Theodore is lord of an exploded ­castle (“The moment Theodore appeared, the walls of the ­castle b ­ ehind Manfred ­were thrown down with a mighty force” [103]) and a dynastic marriage characterized primarily by sorrow rather than sexual ­union (“he was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul” [105]). Otranto’s conclusion deconstructs the material and social forms meant to proj­ect a heteropatriarchal ­future from the marriage plot’s happy ending, leaving us instead with ruined fragments and an atmosphere of gloom. The ending thus formally mimics the entrance to Strawberry Hill and suggests how an ending might also be an entrance: how, in Muñoz’s words, “a rejection of the ­here and now” can function as “an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”55 Embracing gloomth’s potentialities means rejecting Enlightenment ­f utures to imagine something or somewhere ­else. This becomes clearer through Sean Silver’s reading of the stairwell at Strawberry Hill (the staging ground both for the lantern and for the dream that inspired The ­Castle of Otranto). Silver identifies the staircase’s landing as “perhaps the most impor­tant” of the vantage points in the ­house ­because of its challenge to eighteenth-­century Whig visions of history invested in “rediscovering, at e­ very point, a ubiquitous and gradual progression from ‘darkness’ to ‘light’ ” (see figure 6.7).56 As Silver observes, the stairwell’s landing “stages and personalizes the central trope of Enlightenment historiography; the visitor stands at the moment between (as Walpole puts it in Historic Doubts) ‘barbarity’ and ‘polish,’ or (as Walpole puts it in his Description) ‘gloom’ and ‘illumination.’ ”57 Silver concentrates on how the position of Walpole’s trea­sured suit of armor in this space performs a revisionist historiography: as a “Gothic artifact coming to light before one’s eyes,” it enacts a history in which the pre­sent, rather than existing as a “clean and well-­lighted place of Enlightenment rationality,” is “crisscrossed and sometimes traumatized by objects of the historical past.”58 Silver’s reading thus emphasizes the disruptive effect of such exploded fragments and outmoded forms. Yet the gothic lantern also hangs “in the well of the staircase” directly beside the landing that Silver discusses, generating a visual effect that does not resolve into ­either light or darkness but instead mingles the two seemingly opposite qualities.59 While the suit of armor interrupts a path to enlightenment, the lamp brings darkness and light together in a haze that pervades and envelops instead of advancing. As a technology of queer time, the lantern produces gloomth rather than enlightenment, materializing “the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” instead of a linear progression from past to ­future.60 The lantern’s role in generating this “anticipatory illumination” is particularly signifi-

Figure 6.7. ​Edward Edwards, “Staircase at Strawberry Hill,” 1784, from Walpole’s extra-­i llustrated copy of A Description of the Villa . . . ​at Strawberry-­Hill, Lewis Walpole Library, folio 49 3582. This image shows the view from the staircase’s landing. The lantern, not included in this illustration, hung beside the landing. Image courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

114

E m i ly M . W e s t

cant given the way that technological objects w ­ ere called on to manifest enlightenment.61 For instance, Francis Bacon contrasts “the life of men in any of the most civilised provinces of Eu­rope and in the most savage and barbarous region of New India.” Bacon claims that their conditions “differ so much that deservedly it may be said that ‘man is a God to man’ ” and that this difference can be attributed primarily to “Arts.” He continues: It helps to notice the force, power and consequences of discoveries, which appear at their clearest in three ­t hings that ­were unknown to antiquity, . . . ​namely the art of printing, gunpowder and the nautical compass. In fact ­t hese three ­t hings have changed the face and condition of t­ hings all over the globe: the first in lit­ er­a­ture; the second in the art of war; the third in navigation; and innumerable changes have followed; so that no empire or sect or star seems to have exercised a greater power and influence on ­human affairs than ­t hose mechanical ­t hings.62

In Bacon’s theorization, technological objects materialize modernity along with the timescale that situates modernity as a progression from a superseded past—­a colonial timescale in which this past remains embodied by racialized subjects. Bacon’s framework was l­ater reprised in the writings of Royal Society fellows like Robert Hooke, who believed that “humane Nature” is “capable of being so far advanced by the helps of Art, and Experience, as to make some Men excel o ­ thers in their Observations, and Deductions, almost as much as they do Beasts”: an advancement that he believes “has been of late years accomplisht” by “the adding of artificial Organs to the natu­ral” and more specifically through “the invention of Optical Glasses” like telescopes and microscopes.63 For scientists like Hooke, such optical technologies served as both the engines and evidence of Enlightenment modernity. Walpole’s lantern is also, of course, an optical technology, and its function is not as distinct from Hooke’s telescopes and microscopes as the narratives of material and social advancement associated with scientific instruments claim. In its projective function, the gothic lantern resembles the magic lantern, a device that illuminated and cast images from glass slides. Magic lanterns w ­ ere pop­u­lar­ized in the seventeenth c­ entury alongside technologies like the telescope and constructed using many of the same princi­ples as ­these other optical mechanisms. Samuel Pepys writes in 1666 of an eve­ning spent on “Opticke enquiries” with Richard Reeve, Restoration London’s premier maker of optical technologies (including scientific instruments used by Christopher Wren, Henry Power, Robert Hooke, and Robert Boyle):64 “He bringing me a frame with closes on, to see how the Rays of light do cut one another, and in a dark room with smoake, which is very pretty. He did also bring a lantern, with pictures in glass to make strange t­ hings appear on a wall, very pretty. We did also at night see Jupiter and his girdle and Satellites very fine with my 12-­foot glass, but could not Saturne, he being very dark.”65 Reeve’s lantern is presented alongside the telescope, indicating their functional similarities: in fact, both had previously served as instruments of “natu­ral magic” (as had the microscope). While microscopes and telescopes ­were remade as instru-

T e c h n o l o g y, T e m p o r a l i t y, a n d Q u e e r F o r m

115

Figure 6.8. ​Willem ’s Gravesande, Mathematical Ele­ments of Natu­ral Philosophy, Confirm’d by Experiments; or, An introduction to Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (1721), p. 105, via Wellcome Collection (Public Domain Mark).

ments of natu­ral philosophy, the magic lantern “retained its association with natu­ral magic longer than most instruments from the seventeenth c­ entury,” as its name indicates.66 ­Because of the lantern’s per­sis­tent association with the occult, magic lantern shows troubled the narratives of progression to modernity materialized by the seemingly more rational mechanisms to which they w ­ ere linked. In his analy­sis of the technology, Koen Vermeir observes that “Monsters appeared wherever a magic lantern was installed. Even [Willem] ’s Gravesande’s illustration of a magic lantern, drawn in a serious book on scientific demonstration lectures, proj­ects a deformed monster” (see figure 6.8).67 This inherent unruliness would eventually be capitalized on in the late eighteenth-­century phenomenon of the

116

E m i ly M . W e s t

phantasmagoria: “illusionistic exhibitions and public entertainments in which ‘specters’ ­were produced through the use of a magic lantern.”68 Like the magic lantern, Walpole’s lantern produced visual effects that “gave the illusion of bridging the gap between the ­here and the over ­t here, the real and the ­imagined, the intangible and the material.”69 Like the phantasmagoria, his lantern used forms meant to generate illustrious f­ utures to cast instead specters roaming out of time and place. The gothic lantern thus participates in the magic lantern’s troubling of the progressive historical narratives supposedly materialized by technological objects; and, crucially, Walpole’s optical technology shows how t­ hese historical trajectories are bound up with the history of sexuality and the time of inheritance. Through the lantern’s operation, Walpole brings together a critique of the heteropatriarchal ­family as a social form with a rejection of linear narratives of rational modernity and the mechanisms conscripted to produce Enlightenment f­ utures, illuminating instead “a queerness to come.”70 Walpole’s gothic drama The Mysterious M ­ other plays with ­these optics of Enlightenment as its plot and form push The ­Castle of Otranto’s queer aesthetics to new extremities. Most significantly, The Mysterious M ­ other amplifies the threat of incest raised in Otranto by Manfred’s marriage to Hippolita (he claims that they are “related . . . ​in the fourth degree” [48] in an attempt to legally dissolve the marriage) and sexual pursuit of his promised daughter-­in-­law, Isabella. In The Mysterious ­Mother, such genealogical perversity is elevated to the play’s central secret and driving narrative force. In it, the Countess of Narbonne has played a bed trick to secretly sleep with her son, Edmund, and their ­daughter, Adeliza, is the product of the incestuous u ­ nion. When Edmund returns to Narbonne sixteen years ­after his guilty ­mother banished him, still unaware of the events that led to his exile, he falls in love with Adeliza (whom the Countess has raised as an orphan ward) and marries her; the revelation of Adeliza’s true parentage destroys the marriage and concludes the play. Florian, Edmund’s companion on his journey back to his ancestral estate, imagines the heir’s return to Narbonne as a triumph of modernity. Rebuking the monk Benedict, who has held devious sway over the Countess during Edmund’s exile, he describes ­ ese sixteen years . . . ​my friend Edmund pin’d in banishment: Th While masses, mummings, goblins and pro­cessions Usurp’d his heritage, and made of Narbonne A theatre of holy interludes And sainted frauds. But day darts on your spells. Th’enlighten’d age eschews your vile deceits, And truth s­ hall do mankind and Edmund justice.71

In Florian’s vision, Edmund’s assumption of his rightful genealogical place at Narbonne enacts in miniature a historical progression from past to f­ uture, from primitive superstition to rationality: a progression conceptualized through a tran-

T e c h n o l o g y, T e m p o r a l i t y, a n d Q u e e r F o r m

117

sition from darkness to light and materialized through Edmund’s marriage (and ­f uture progeny). Edmund likewise uses illumination to imagine this ­f uture when he soliloquizes his wish to Make . . . ​t he blooming Adeliza mine, And bear, of me unquestion’d, Narbonne’s sceptre; Till life’s expiring lamp by intervals Throws but fainter and a fainter flash, And then relumes its wasted oil no more. (69)

Edmund ­here uses the image of a lamp to express the length of an individual life; ­a fter the lamp is extinguished, that life can continue only dynastically, through ­future heirs to the Narbonne line. Yet the play makes a grim mockery of Edmund’s words with the revelation of his double incest. As part of this revelation, his m ­ other explains its circumstances: her husband, on whom her “luxurious fancy / Doated,” had been absent for eigh­teen months; at his expected return she discovered instead his death, which raised a “storm of disappointed passions” that “Assail’d [her] reason, fever’d all [her] blood” (114–115). In this state, she tells her son, “my fancy saw thee / Thy f­ ather’s image,” and she secretly took Edmund’s lover’s place in a tryst (115). This confusion between patriarch and heir recurs when the Countess sees Edmund for the first time a­ fter his return to Narbonne: she again takes her son for the “phantom” of his dead ­father, and pages of confusion culminate in her impassioned interrogation: Art thou my husband wing’d from other orbs To taunt my soul? What is this dubious form, Impress’d with ev’ry feature I adore, And ­every lineament I dread to look on! Art thou my dead or living son? (66)

Edmund cannot be resolved into heir, corpse, or apparition: fundamentally “dubious,” he is all at once. The Mysterious ­Mother thus intensifies the effect of mingling forms that organizes The ­Castle of Otranto. While Theodore was frequently indistinguishable from both his illegitimate double, Conrad, and his legitimating ancestor, Alfonso, Edmund’s indistinguishability from his ­father is both the sign of his legitimacy and the source of its perverse destruction. This contradiction is captured in the image of the illuminated lamp: while Edmund uses the image to describe the time of inheritance, an endless succession in which a life, extinguished, passes on its flame to be borne by the next generation, the Countess over and over again sees Edmund’s dead ­father “relumed” in the body of her son. This too-­literal version of inheritance’s structuring mechanisms reveals the normative operations of straight time’s “self-­naturalizing temporality” as a claustrophobic horror, demonstrating Stephanie Insley Hershinow’s observation that “the incest plot scandalizes the marriage plot’s heteronormative logic, revealing through the exaggeration of heteronormativity the essential perversity of t­hose norms as such.”72 The

118

E m i ly M . W e s t

­ ysterious ­Mother’s conclusion likewise scandalizes Enlightenment. Though FloM rian believes the clarifying light of rational modernity “­shall do mankind and Edmund justice” (101), the hoped-­for revelations are monstrous. Rather than projecting a ­future, ­here Enlightenment’s linked visual and genealogical forms perform instead an endless, obscene recursion. The Mysterious ­Mother thus evokes normative material, social, and narrative forms of futurity only to halt them, deploying the incest plot’s ability to figure plot “at its most static and, therefore, at its most resistant to plot as w ­ e’ve tended to understand it (that is, as the kind of desire that moves us inexorably forward).” 73 The “catastrophe” of the play’s conclusion ultimately explodes such ­futures, leaving us to pick up the pieces, to imagine and make something ­else.74 As I have traced across this chapter, Walpole’s gothic aesthetics materialize alternate ­f utures through a formal methodology of queer worldmaking. Yet ­t hese gothic forms also reconstruct foundational Enlightenment vio­lence. When narrating the Vere ­family’s decline, for instance—­t he ruin that makes the ­family’s fragmented remains available for remaking at Strawberry Hill—­Walpole couches his mockery in anti-­Blackness. He writes to George Montagu that when Lord and Lady Vere visited Strawberry Hill, they “called cousins with [the lantern], and would very readily have invited it to Hanworth,” where they then lived: “but her Portuguese blood has so blackened the true stream, that I c­ an’t bring myself to offer so fair a gift to their chapel.”75 This reference picks up a strand of gossip that had featured in Walpole’s correspondence with Montagu since the 1740s; in ­t hese letters he repeatedly speculates (and makes racist jokes) about the current Lady Vere’s Portuguese grand­mother.76 And while, for Walpole, the “blackening” of the Vere line extinguishes its f­ utures, his gothic lantern made “of tin japanned” uses an Orientalized material blackness to enclose its En­glish heraldic fragments.77 Read alongside Walpole’s racist disdain for Lady Vere, this aspect of the lantern’s construction suggests how the technology’s capacity to produce gloomth is literally structured by the blackness excluded from its anticipatory illumination. Walpole’s claim to the Vere line may shatter the British f­ amily to make a queer utopia, but this utopia is premised on the white supremacy it reconstitutes. ­Here too we might consider how Walpole’s gothic incest plots, as they twist inheritance and halt narrative’s forward motion, also perform the consolidation of whiteness followed to its logical conclusion through their extreme re­sis­tance to exogamy. Thus, though Carolyn Dinshaw theorizes amateur medievalism of the kind that organizes Walpole’s gothic proj­ect as an affective form that can “bring out or enact temporal multiplicities” and “point to or even create completely other kinds of time,” it is crucial to remember how often such attachments are ­shaped by a racial logic: by explicit or implicit fantasies of a white past and a white f­ uture.78 What can we make of ­these inheritances, inseparable from Walpole’s f­ uture vision? Muñoz articulates a queer utopian hermeneutic that is unfaithful to its sources; as he writes about his own use of Ernst Bloch’s work as a primary theoretical framework for Cruising Utopia, even though “it has been rumored that Bloch did not hold very progressive opinions on issues of gender and sexuality,” and about Herbert Marcuse’s intellectual

T e c h n o l o g y, T e m p o r a l i t y, a n d Q u e e r F o r m

119

engagement with the Nazi phi­los­o­pher Martin Heidegger, “To draw from such sources and ultimately make them serve another proj­ect, one that the author himself would have quickly denounced, serves as a critical engagement—­critique as willful disloyalty to the master.” 79 Walpole’s own gothic methodology stages an encounter with the past that remains flagrantly unfaithful to its forms and the ­f utures they demand, generating instead an elsewhere. We too need to be disloyal to our sources, willing to smash and remake our eighteenth-­century archive and so attempt to illuminate other f­ utures.

notes 1.  Horace Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole, Youn­gest Son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-­Hill, Near Twickenham. With an Inventory of the Furniture, Pictures, Curiosities, &c. (Twickenham, UK: Strawberry Hill Press, 1784), 2. 2.  Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, Strawberry Hill, April 27, 1753, in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 20:372. 3.  Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, Strawberry Hill, June 12, 1753, in Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 20:381. Walpole wrote of the “origin” of The C ­ astle of Otranto that “I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient ­castle (a very natu­ral dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a ­great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.” Horace Walpole to William Cole, Strawberry Hill, March 9, 1765, in Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 1:88. 4. Walpole, Description of the Villa, i. On the relationship between text and architecture at Strawberry Hill specifically, see also Ruth Mack, “Paper C ­ astle, Paper Collection: Walpole’s Extra-­Illustrated Copy of the Description of . . . ​Strawberry Hill,” in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, ed. Michael Snodin and Cynthia Roman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 107–115; and Luisa Calè, “Extra-­Illustration and Ephemera: Altered Books and the Alternative Forms of the Fugitive Page,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 44, no. 2 (2020): 111–135. 5.  Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 4. Michael Nicholson has recently analyzed Walpole’s collection of his early writing, Fugitive Pieces in Verse and Prose (1758), using the framework of queer temporality: see Nicholson, “Fugitive Pieces: Walpole, Byron, and Queer Time,” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 60, no. 2 (2019): 139–162. 6.  José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and ­There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 25. 7.  Horace Walpole to George Montagu, Strawberry Hill, June  11, 1753, in Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 9:150–151. 8. Anna Eavis and Michael Peover, Horace Walpole’s Painted Glass at Strawberry Hill (London: British Society of Master Glass Paint­ers, 1995), 1. 9.  Michael Peover, “Stained and Painted Glass,” in Snodin and Roman, Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, 64–65. 10. Richard Marks, “The Reception and Display of Northern Eu­ro­pean Roundels in ­England,” Gesta 37, no. 2 (1998): 220, 218, 219. 11.  Horace Walpole to George Montagu, Mistley, July 25, 1748, in Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 9:67. 12.  Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of ­England from the Accession of James II, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849), 320. 13.  Lewis Majendie, An Account of Hedingham ­Castle, in the Country of Essex (London: John Nichols, 1796), 1. 14.  Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 4.

120

E m i ly M . W e s t

15.  Lee Edelman, No ­Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 16. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 4. 17.  Walpole to Montagu, Mistley, July 25, 1748, 9:63. 18.  Horace Walpole, The C ­ astle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, ed. Nick Groom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 5–6. Further references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text. 19.  OED Online, s.v. “exploded, adj.” (Oxford: Oxford University Press), https://­w ww​.­oed​.c­ om. 20.  Walter Scott, introduction to The C ­ astle of Otranto (1811), by Horace Walpole, in Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage, ed. Peter Sabor (New York: Routledge, 2007), 93. For two dif­fer­ ent views on this question, see Laura Doyle, “At Liberty’s Limits: Walpole and Lewis,” in Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 215–229; and Abbey Coykendall, “Chance Enlightenments, Choice Superstitions: Walpole’s Historic Doubts and Enlightenment Historicism,” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 54, no. 1 (2013): 53–70. 21.  Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, in Northanger Abbey and Other Stories, ed. James Kinsley, John Davie, and Claudia L. Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 145. 22.  OED Online, s.vv. “explode, v.,” “exploded, adj.” (Oxford: Oxford University Press), https://­w ww​.­oed​.c­ om. 23.  See George Haggerty, Horace Walpole’s Letters: Masculinity and Friendship in the Eigh­ teenth ­Century (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011); and Jill Campbell, “ ‘I Am No ­Giant’: Horace Walpole, Heterosexual Incest, and Love among Men,” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 39, no. 3 (1998): 238–260. 24. Haggerty, Horace Walpole’s Letters, 72. 25.  Eugenia Zuroski, “ ‘That You May Show Us What We Have Seen’: Bentley’s Drawings and the Archive of Queer Feeling,” paper presented at “Text Artefact Identity: Horace Walpole and the Queer Eigh­teenth ­Century,” Twickenham, UK, February 2019. 26.  Michael Peover and Kevin Rogers, “New Light on Strawberry Hill: Walpole’s Display of Glass and the Repre­sen­ta­tion of the Ancient Abbey,” Journal of Stained Glass 34 (2010): 10. 27.  Horace Walpole to Bentley, Tunbridge, August 5, 1752, in Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 35:143; Zuroski, “ ‘That You May Show Us What We Have Seen.’ ” 28.  Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, Arlington Street, January 10, 1750 OS, in Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 20:111. 29.  Walpole to Mann, Strawberry Hill, June 12, 1753, 20:381. 30.  Andreas Petzold, “Stained Glass in the Age of Neoclassicism: The Case of Eglington Margaret Pearson,” British Art Journal 2, no. 1 (2000): 58. 31.  Alice Tweedy McGrath, “Unaccountable Form: Queer Failure and Jane Barker’s Patchwork Method,” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 60, no. 4 (2019): 354. 32.  Ibid., 357. 33. Macaulay, The History of ­England, 320. 34.  Anne F. Harris, “Glazing and Glossing: Stained Glass as Literary Interpretation,” Journal of Glass Studies 56 (2014): 303. 35.  Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, Strawberry Hill, September 30, 1784, in Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 25:532. 36.  Matthew M. Reeve, “Dickie Bateman and the Gothicization of Old Windsor: Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole,” Architectural History 56 (2013): 115. 37.  Ibid., 115–116. 38.  Horace Walpole to William Cole, Strawberry Hill, July 12, 1778, in Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 2:100. 39.  Reeve, “Dickie Bateman,” 115. 40.  Walpole to Mann, Strawberry Hill, April 27, 1753, in Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 20:372. 41. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 25. 42.  Ibid., 1. 43.  Ibid., 28.

T e c h n o l o g y, T e m p o r a l i t y, a n d Q u e e r F o r m

121

44.  Ibid., 4. 45.  See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986). 46.  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, ­You’re So Paranoid You Prob­ably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 149. 47.  Ibid., 147. 48.  Harris, “Glazing and Glossing,” 303. 49.  Critical Review, January 1765, in Sabor, Horace Walpole, 69. 50.  Walpole to Cole, Strawberry Hill, March 9, 1765, 1:88. 51.  Matthew  M. Reeve, Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020), 116. 52.  Jason Farr, Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-­Century British Lit­er­a­ ture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019), 18–19. 53.  Ibid., 19. 54.  Harris, “Glazing and Glossing,” 303. 55. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 56.  Sean Silver, “Visiting Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Historiography,” Eigh­ teenth ­Century Fiction 21, no. 4 (2009): 542. 57.  Ibid., 556. 58.  Ibid., 550. 59. Walpole, A Description of the Villa, 2. 60. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 61.  Ibid., 22; Muñoz writes that “A posterior glance at dif­fer­ent moments, objects, and spaces might offer us an anticipatory illumination of queerness.” 62.  Francis Bacon, The New Organon, trans. and ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 100. 63. Robert Hooke, Micrographia; or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses (London: Martyn and Allestree, 1665), v, viii–ix. 64.  A.D.C. Simpson, “Reeve, Richard (d. 1666), Maker of Optical Instruments,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: In Association with the British Acad­emy: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/48372. 65.  Samuel Pepys, “19 August 1666,” in The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A Se­lection, ed. Robert Latham (London: Penguin, 2003), 655. 66. Thomas  L. Hankins and Robert  J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1995), 70. 67.  Koen Vermeir, “The Magic of the Magic Lantern (1660–1700): On Analogical Demonstration and the Visualization of the Invisible,” British Society for the History of Science 38, no. 2 (2005): 135. 68.  Terry ­Castle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Meta­phorics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (1988): 27. For a sustained analy­sis of the relationship between gothic fiction and optical technologies like the magic lantern, see David  J. Jones, Gothic Machine: Textualities, Pre-­cinematic Media and Film in Popu­lar Visual Culture, 1670–1910 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011). 69.  Jill H. Casid, Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 3. 70. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 25. 71.  Horace Walpole, The Mysterious ­Mother: A Tragedy (Twickenham, UK: Strawberry Hill Press, 1768), 100–101. Further references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text. 72. Stephanie Insley Hershinow, “The Incest Plot: Marriage, Closure, and the Novel’s Endogamy,” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 61, no. 2 (2020): 154. 73.  Ibid., 150. 74.  Walpole writes in his “Postscript” to the play that “­Every scene tends to bring on the catastrophe, and the story is never interrupted or diverted from its course” as part of his

122

E m i ly M . W e s t

assertion that the work follows the dramatic “rules laid down by the critics.” Horace Walpole, “Postscript,” in The Mysterious ­Mother, 7–8. 75.  Walpole to Montagu, Strawberry Hill, June 11, 1753, in Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 9:151. 76.  See Horace Walpole to George Montagu, Mistley, July 14, 1748, in Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 9:59–62; Walpole to Montagu, Mistley, July 25, 1748, ibid., 9:63–67; and Walpole to Montagu, Strawberry Hill, August 11, 1748, ibid., 9:67–73. 77. For a discussion of the conceptual and material links between Orientalism and ­a nti-­Blackness in the long eigh­teenth c­ entury, see Chi-­ming Yang, “Asia Out of Place: The Aesthetics of Incorruptibility in Behn’s Oroonoko,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 42, no. 2 (2009): 235–253. 78.  Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 29. See also Helen Young, “Race, Medievalism and the Eighteenth-­Century Gothic Turn,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2020): 468–475; and recent reckonings with the structuring racism of medieval studies in, for example, Dorothy Kim, “Introduction to Lit­er­a­ture Compass Special Cluster: Critical Race and the ­Middle Ages,” Lit­er­a­ture Compass 16, nos. 9–10 (2019): 1–16. 79. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 2, 17.

chapter 7

•

Telegraphic Supremacy in Maria Edgeworth’s “Lame Jervas” Deven M. Parker

In 2018, the U.S. Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act to prohibit government agencies from contracting with the Chinese telecom ­giant Huawei, the largest smartphone com­pany in the world. The ban was passed on the grounds that Huawei could potentially use its devices to spy on Americans for the Chinese state.1 Despite Huawei’s per­sis­tent denials of state collusion, Congress instituted the technology ban “for the purposes of public safety, security of government facilities, physical security surveillance of critical infrastructure, and other national security purposes.”2 It also urged American consumers and businesses not to purchase Huawei’s phones despite the brand’s ubiquity in global markets. Of course, this was not the first time that national security concerns prompted suspicion of foreign technologies, nor the first time that some p ­ eople feared that communication technologies would also facilitate dangerous forms of surveillance. Indeed, only six years prior to the Huawei ban, the United States itself was implicated in cell-­phone spying.3 Even more recently, the Israeli surveillance com­pany NSO Group came ­under fire for selling its hacking spyware, Pegasus, to authoritarian governments across the globe.4 Situating t­hese events within a broad historical context, this essay explores how anx­i­eties about foreign communication technologies ­were as prevalent in eighteenth-­century Britain as they are now—­and what this period’s lit­er­a­ture can reveal to us about emerging technologies and the national interests they serve. “Lame Jervas,” the novella occupying the first volume of Maria Edgeworth’s Popu­ lar Tales (1804), serves as a case study in this essay for exploring early Romantic attempts to neutralize the disruptive potential of a par­tic­u­lar technology: the optical telegraph. Building on recent work by Mary Fairclough, Aileen Douglas, and ­others who have analyzed repre­sen­ta­tions of this unique technology, I situate “Lame Jervas” in a period of intense preoccupation in newspapers and other media with the optical telegraph, which was perceived in the final de­cade of the eigh­teenth ­century as a threat both close to home and throughout the empire.5 British writers 123

124

D e v e n M . Pa r k e r

and cartoonists feared that it might further the agendas not just of Jacobin radicals but also of Revolutionary France’s key military ally in India, Tipu Sultan. Responding to t­ hese concerns, Edgeworth recasts the telegraph in her novella as a signifier of Britain’s imperial stability and technological superiority at a time when neither was certain. Edgeworth’s titular Jervas, an En­glish inventor and man of science, travels to India to exhibit inventions to “Tippoo Sultan,” an Orientalized despot based on the real ruler who, in the 1790s, controlled vast swaths of India and fought a series of wars with the East India Com­pany.6 Edgeworth’s fictional Tippoo eagerly embraces the technologies presented to him by the En­glish narrator and is especially enthusiastic about Jervas’s portable telegraph. Edgeworth’s f­ ather, the Anglo-­ Irish statesman Richard Lovell Edgeworth, had in­ven­ted a version of this device years ­earlier, but it was never officially ­adopted by the state. As I show, his efforts ­were part of a broader campaign in the 1790s to establish a telegraph network in ­England and Ireland as a precaution against invasion while Britain was at war with France. France had recently established its own telegraph network, which quickly became a symbol of Jacobinism and a sign, thanks to the British press, of France’s military gains over ­England. Facing pressure to compete with France, the administration of Prime Minister William Pitt began soliciting designs for a telegraph that was as effective as France’s but distinctly British in its invention and design. Lovell Edgeworth, with his d ­ aughter’s assistance, published multiple pamphlets advocating for the state’s adoption of his telegraph.7 “Lame Jervas” channels national anxiety about foreign technological advances through, paradoxically, its cele­bration of British technological ingenuity. By Edgeworth’s having Tippoo Sultan take up her ­father’s telegraph, she casts the technology as a distinctly British export, joining a chorus of writers, including her f­ ather, who, in the face of fears about perceived French military gains thanks to the telegraph, endeavored to show that the device was in fact a local invention rather than a dangerous foreign import. In the fight to re-­imagine the telegraph’s origins, “Lame Jervas” portrays the telegraph and other technologies as a means of expanding Britain’s imperial influence at a time when the nation was seen as falling ­behind o ­ thers, particularly France, in a race for technological supremacy. Given the optical telegraph’s relative obscurity, especially compared to the nineteenth-­century device of the same name, it is worth recounting its origins. Using e­ ither windmill-­like arms (the French version) or shutters (the British version), the movements of optical telegraphs represented coded words or letters. Telegraph operators used telescopes to rec­ord the movements of a telegraph situated several miles away and then repeated the message to the next station in the network ­u ntil it arrived at its destination. The telegraph network was installed in ­England in 1795 in order to transmit information between the southern coast and London about ­enemy movements in the Channel. Unfortunately for operators, foggy weather on the En­glish coast often interfered with its use.8 The network was a public medium for private information as it visibly conveyed coded messages. Its messages ­were hidden in plain sight, vis­i­ble to every­one but intelligible only to

T e l e g r a p h i c S u p r e m a c y i n “ L a m e J e r va s ”

125

a privileged minority of officers. Th ­ ose who observed the movements of the device set atop the office of the Admiralty at Charing Cross would have known that a secret message was being conveyed before their eyes. Joseph Lakanal, one of the leaders of the French Revolution, famously tested France’s telegraph on July 12, 1793, sending a message from Saint Martin-­du-­Tertre to Ménilmontant—­a distance of over fifty-­one kilo­meters—in just nine minutes.9 Advocating for the adoption and installation of the machine, which was first in­ven­ ted by Claude Chappe, Lakanal l­ ater wrote, “what brilliant destiny do science and the arts not reserve for a republic which, by the genius of its inhabitants, is called to become the nation to instruct Eu­rope.”10 His prediction came true: not only did France’s revolutionary fervor spread across the world, but by the m ­ iddle of the nineteenth c­ entury, most nations in Eu­rope had erected telegraph systems of their own, to varying degrees of success. Yet none matched the efficiency of the French system: messages sent from Paris reached the nation’s borders in about three to four hours, compared to the several days it took messengers on h ­ orse­back. The speed at which French messages could be conveyed shocked the international community when, in September 1794, papers reported that the National Convention received the telegraphic message that it had captured the Royalist outpost of Condé—263 kilo­meters from Paris—on the same day it happened.11 Britain’s development and implementation of its own optical telegraph system was motivated by British newspapers, whose coverage of the French telegraph’s effectiveness culminated in a media frenzy that ultimately influenced the Pitt administration’s adoption of the device and even the design of the technology itself. The first mention (that I can find) of the French telegraph in En­glish newspapers appeared on September 18, 1794, in the British Eve­ning Post; it conveys significant anxiety about the foreign invention’s speed and efficiency: “If we are to believe the Dutch accounts, the French Telegraph is much superior to what it has hitherto been conceived to be. They say, that an account of the surrender of Sluys was sent to Paris, and an answer from the Committee of Publick Safety received by the Representatives of the ­People with the army, in half an hour ­after the capitulation.”12 The report appears directly a­ fter a notice about continued mob brutality in Paris, where France was at the height of its notorious Reign of Terror. Read within this context, the report on the telegraph is presented as evidence of the dangerous threat that France represented to En­glish national security. The paper cites the source of its intelligence as foreign, a kind of international hearsay that leaves room for speculation and pos­si­ble disbelief on the part of the reader. Yet even as the report’s second­hand nature seems designed to undercut its authenticity, the italicized “half an hour” evokes fear and awe of what the telegraph may be capable of, sensationalizing its capacity for speed. In the months that followed this initial notice, British papers regularly reported on France’s effective use of telegraphy, continuing to marvel at its speed and linking t­hese reports with the e­ nemy’s continued victories. One notice from the ­Courier and Eve­ning Gazette reads that “the intelligence of the surrender of Saas-­de-­Grand, Phillipine, Hulst, and Axel was reported to the Convention in their

126

D e v e n M . Pa r k e r

sitting of the 25th by the telegraph, which conveyed the intelligence in 50 minutes from Lisle to Paris,” while days ­later the Morning Chronicle related that “the Telegraph continues to announce victories obtained or fortresses taken.”13 ­These notices conflate France’s rapid series of military victories with the telegraph’s power to convey this news back to Paris. Even though the telegraph merely reported on ­t hese victories—­just as the papers themselves did—­t he British press suggested a causal link between France’s military successes and its telegraph network. Interestingly, British newspapers reported on the phenomenon of reporting itself, implying that communication networks ­were an integral part of French military might and as newsworthy as any ­battle. The French telegraph thus came to stand for more than the device itself: it embodied national anxiety about France’s military gains, a pos­ si­ble French invasion of ­England, and, from an ideological perspective, the power of Jacobin idealism. Thanks to this flurry of reports in autumn of 1794, the British public understandably yearned to see and experience the marvels of the French telegraph, even as it worried that the rival nation had a leg up on military technology. The papers fed this desire by offering detailed descriptions of the device, as in a November 26 article in the Courier and Eve­ning Gazette that described how “a proof has been made of the telegraph at the Palace . . . ​to convey intelligence through Trattberg to Drottningholm at the distance of one league and an half, in a few moments. The machine consists in a high piece of timber, with two moveable cross beams on each side; by the nature of their movements the intelligence is understood.”14 In addition to descriptions of the telegraph’s application and appearance, ­others offered the chance to view the inimitable invention in person. The Morning Post, for example, advertised a telegraph exhibition at Astley’s New Circus, claiming that “Mr. Astley . . . ​flatters himself that he is perfectly acquainted with the nature and construction of the telegraphe, so much the conversation, astonishment, and admiration of the pre­sent day. [He] ­will exhibit it for a few eve­nings, at the Lyceum, in the Strand.”15 Advertisements like this also speak to the climate of secrecy that surrounded the French telegraph, contributing to its hype. Even though it was widely reported on, few knew what it looked like, and almost none had seen it in person. ­Those like Mr.  Astley, who claimed familiarity with its appearance and workings, could be seen to possess privileged intelligence, a win­dow into the secret source of France’s military prowess. Coupled with the public’s eagerness for news about the telegraph and glimpses of its appearance was the conflicting sense that this technology, as a physical manifestation of radicalism and foreign vio­lence, was at once something to fear but also something that should be replicated in E ­ ngland. We get a glimpse of this sentiment in James Gillray’s print of January  26, 1795, “French-­Telegraph Making Signals in the Dark” (figure 7.1). The print shows William Pitt’s Whig rival, Charles James Fox, as a h ­ uman French telegraph helping the e­ nemy fleet invade ­England, to critique Fox’s support for the Revolution. Fox’s limbs become the characteristic windmill arms of the telegraph, which he uses to shine light on the French fleet

T e l e g r a p h i c S u p r e m a c y i n “ L a m e J e r va s ”

127

Figure 7.1. ​James Gillray, “French-­Telegraph Making Signals in the Dark.” Hand-­colored ­etching and aquatint. London: Published for H. Humphrey, 1795. B1981.25.907. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

and provide navigational assistance to the invading army. Gillray depicts the French telegraph as a military weapon and, crucially, an extension of the nation’s new violent regime that threatens to infiltrate Britain both physically and ideologically. By supposedly embracing Jacobin radicalism, Fox physically transforms into its most power­f ul weapon and symbol. As telegraph depictions proliferated between 1794 and 1795, Britain saw a wave of support for adopting the telegraph in the country, despite the device’s association with Jacobinism. Many Britons felt that their nation needed to create a telegraph of its own to gain military ground over France; however, this required a delicate balance of replicating the French invention while making it distinctly British in order to evacuate the technology of the dangerous ideology that, thanks to Gillray and ­others, it had come to embody. As Mary Fairclough argues in her analy­ sis of telegraph repre­sen­ta­tions from this period, the “strong impulse to adapt the telegraph for use in Britain demonstrates the importance of removing the stigma of appropriating a French revolutionary machine.”16 The prolific theater entertainer Charles Dibdin called for precisely this balance of technological borrowing and remaking in a song about the telegraph that appeared in his 1794 ­Great News, or a Trip to the Antipodes:

128

D e v e n M . Pa r k e r

If you’ll only just promise you’ll none of you laugh, I’ll be ­a fter explaining the French telegraph! A machine that’s endow’d with such wonderful pow’r, It writes, reads, and sends news fifty miles in an hour. Then t­ here’s watch-­words, a spy-­glass, and index on hand, And many t­ hings more none of us understand; But which, like the nose on your face, ­w ill be clear, When we have, as usual, improv’d on them ­here. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adieu, penny-­posts! mails and coaches, adieu; Your occupations’ gone, ’tis all over wid you: In your place, telegraphs on our h ­ ouses w ­ e’ll see, To tell time, conduct lightning, dry shirts, and send news. Then, while signals and flags stream on top of each street, The town to a bird ­w ill appear a g­ rand fleet: And since ­England’s ­grand fleet to the French conveys fear, Sure, shan’t we improve on the telegraph h ­ ere?17

The initial lines of Dibdin’s song echo the awe and fear of t­ hose early news reports, speculating about the telegraph’s unpre­ce­dented powers and speed and claiming to have special access to its secret workings. Yet, claims the song, the telegraph’s special abilities w ­ ill only become clear to the British public once the government decides to implement and “improve on” the technology, making it British and thereby rendering it secure. With tongue-­in-­cheek wit, Dibdin imagines a London in which telegraphs replace “penny-­posts,” “mails,” and “coaches,” occupying rooftops across the city. The cumulative effect of introducing telegraphs in London, he argues, ­will be to reverse the fear with which the En­glish currently regard the French telegraph. Rather than the mysterious foreign technology inciting fear, the appearance of London’s telegraphs w ­ ill look like a “­grand fleet” of ships that ­will strike fear into the French and win the war. Making a case for a British reworking of the French telegraph instead of inciting fear of the technology as in Gillray’s depiction, Dibdin concludes his song by putting pressure on the government to “improve on the telegraph” as a show of military might and patriotic pride. Implicit within the humorous song, however, is the concern that Britain w ­ ill not be able to keep pace with France’s technological ingenuity and w ­ ill suffer military losses as a result. The ideas in Dibdin’s song ­were echoed by a series of articles in The Gentleman’s Magazine, which published reader suggestions on how the French machine could be introduced and remade in a distinctly “En­glish” visage.18 In the face of such pressure, the British Admiralty introduced its own telegraph network in 1795. Designed by Lord George Murray, it purportedly worked just like the French system but looked dif­fer­ent enough that it could not be associated with French politics. Rather than arms, Murray’s telegraph deployed a system of shutters that flipped between horizontal and vertical positions to create unique signals, a method that was unfortunately more difficult to decipher at a distance.

T e l e g r a p h i c S u p r e m a c y i n “ L a m e J e r va s ”

129

Even a­ fter Britain’s first telegraph line was erected between London and Deal the following year, many Britons continued to grapple with the embarrassing fact that France had beat them to the punch and that Britain continued to lag technologically, with only one line in its telegraph network compared to the many that France had established throughout Eu­rope. Indeed, many betrayed this apparent insecurity by attempting to prove that E ­ ngland had first in­ven­ted the idea for the technology, even if it had not been first to build or implement it. Newspapers presented such historical revisionism ­under the guise of comparing dif­fer­ent telegraph systems, as when the Whitehall Eve­ning Post reprinted a lengthy excerpt of the scientist Robert Hooke’s 1684 discourse to the Royal Society in which the inventor proposed a plan for “shewing a way how to communicate one’s mind at a ­great distance.”19 Hooke’s treatise was republished in the Post as telegraph mania swept the nation; the paper casts it as the intellectual pre­de­ces­sor of the French invention, suggesting to readers that a British inventor had at least first thought of the idea, even if he never built it. On November 29, 1794, the Morning Post reported that a “telegraphic experiment” had recently taken place in Ireland by an inventor who, like Hooke, had supposedly beaten the French in the race for rapid communications. The report insists that the technology “was originally in­ven­ted by Mr. Edgeworth, of the county of Longford, though first put into real use by the French.”20 As with the report on Hooke, this report insists on the separation—­and the supremacy—of the idea of the telegraph from its practical application; while France may have beaten Britain to the punch with the latter, it is the primacy of ideas that supposedly m ­ atters and, not so subtly, provides evidence of Britain’s superiority. Indeed, Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Maria Edgeworth claimed in multiple essays and memoirs that Lovell Edgeworth had first in­ven­ted the telegraph. In contrast to the French design, Lovell Edgeworth’s portable version employed a system of triangle pointers that indicated combinations of coded symbols. The inventor sought to have the device installed in Ireland, where, during a series of meetings with Irish leaders in 1795 and 1796, he argued that it offered a solution to the pressing concern that the French would attempt an invasion of Ireland’s shores, where, unlike ­England, they might find a populace sympathetic to their radical ideals.21 Much to the Edgeworths’ disappointment, the proposal was rejected. In 1797, Lovell Edgeworth collaborated with his d ­ aughter Maria and published a letter to the Earl of Charlemont complaining about the rejection and arguing for the superiority of his invention’s design over ­others’.22 This publication, along with an essay on the subject that appeared the same year in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Acad­ emy, claims the invention as Lovell Edgeworth’s intellectual property and attempts to rewrite its origins in order to claim it for Britain rather than France.23 Together, the Edgeworths’ essays on telegraphy echo many of the concerns about the dangerous influence of foreign technology expressed in the London newspapers; they also provide an immediate context for Maria Edgeworth’s depiction of telegraphy and technology more generally in “Lame Jervas.” In the Letter to the Right Hon. The Earl of Charlemont, on the Tellograph, and on the Defence of Ireland, the origin story that the Edgeworths assign to the telegraph

130

D e v e n M . Pa r k e r

is crafted to show that Lovell Edgeworth’s invention preceded Claude Chappe’s, as well as Murray’s, ­Gamble’s, or that of any other inventor who staked a claim to it. The Edgeworths offer the following anecdote: When I heard of the French Telegraph a new object arose for my exertions. I recalled to my mind experiments that I had tried so long ago as the year 1767, when I had practiced this species of aerial communication; and thinking that it might be peculiarly useful to this country, I constructed some machines with which I conversed, in August 1794, between Packenham Hall, the seat of Lord Longford, and Edgeworthstown. Finding my success equal to my expectations, I was advised by the pre­sent Bishop of Ossory . . . ​to shew my invention to some gentleman, whose opinion would be attended to by administration.24

Even though the purpose of the essay in question is supposedly to demonstrate that Lovell Edgeworth had been misled and poorly treated by Irish authorities in having his telegraph design rejected, they foreground their argument with evidence of Lovell Edgeworth’s status as the first inventor of the device, tracing the invention back to 1767. Lovell Edgeworth would double down on this account in his Memoirs, explaining how his telegraph was originally conceived as part of a bet.25 He claims, however, that although he had materially in­ven­ted the technology, he did not realize how useful it could potentially be ­until 1794, when France installed its first network. This narrative effectively undercuts the primacy of the French telegraph even while acknowledging it; in other words, it claims that the idea, which is supposedly more impor­tant than the ­t hing itself, belongs to him. In a separate essay that appeared in Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy—­ also penned with Maria Edgeworth—­the inventor not only reasserts the originality of his telegraph design but positions it as part of a longer genealogy of inventions and ideas relating to communicating at a distance. This move serves to legitimize and authenticate his invention and to ­counter the idea that it is a foreign import. “The art of conveying intelligence by sounds and signals is of the highest antiquity,” they write. “It was practiced by Theseus in the Argonautic expedition, by Agamemnon at the siege of Troy, and by Mardonius in the time of Xerxes. . . . ​The signals of Agamemnon are beautifully described in Aeschylus, and ­every station is pointed out with geo­graph­i­cal accuracy. Tamerlane’s telegraphy was not very refined, but it was sufficiently intelligible.”26 The two go on to argue that even the oracles at Delphi should be regarded as a kind of early telegraphic system, through which priests “pretended some secret mode of receiving intelligence.”27 The essay positions Lovell Edgeworth as the intellectual inheritor and successor of t­hese classical military heroes and legendary figures, the modern perfecter of their “beautiful” yet primitive attempts to communicate at a distance. Placing himself within this noble genealogy of telegraphic inventors offers a respectable way of bypassing and downplaying the French inventor Chappe’s supposed ingenuity. When the essay arrives at modern France in describing the historical trajectory of telegraphy, the description of Chappe’s device downplays its effectiveness: “It is sufficient to say that it consists of a tall pole, with three movable arms, which may

T e l e g r a p h i c S u p r e m a c y i n “ L a m e J e r va s ”

131

be seen at a considerable distance through telescopes; . . . ​It is obviously liable to ­mistakes, from the number of changes requisite for each word, and from the velocity with which it must be moved to convey intelligence with any tolerable expedition.”28 The simplistic description of the French telegraph contrasts with the sensationalized depictions that appeared in the En­glish papers, and the Edgeworths emphasize the machine’s fallibility over the real­ity that it was the most effective long-­distance signaling network ever developed, especially compared to Britain’s error-­prone one. In attempting to wrest telegraphy from foreign hands, the authors craft an alternative history in which the French are merely adopters rather than inventors. At the same time, Lovell Edgeworth responds to his telegraph’s critics and his rejection at the hands of the Irish government, claiming that “the disposition to ridicule ­every scientific proj­ect as absurd ­until it has been absolutely brought to perfection has been the common topic of complaint amongst men of inventive genius,” a category in which Lovell Edgeworth includes himself.29 In addition to historicizing the telegraph within a classical framework to mask its associations with radicalism and otherness, the Edgeworths’ Royal Acad­emy essay posits the invention as an integral tool in Britain’s imperial proj­ect. As a symbol of classical culture perfected by modern inventors like Lovell Edgeworth, the telegraph is a force for spreading British power across the world. Telegraphy could achieve this, the writers claim, by serving as a “universal language”—it could erase linguistic differences between nations and promote easier communication and, by extension, commerce between Britain and the East. Rather than learn a new language, a man “who wishes to convey his ideas to foreigners who do not understand his language, or whose language he does not understand” could use telegraphy’s nonverbal symbols to express himself.30 Notably, the essay does not advance the telegraph as a means of discourse or dialogue between p ­ eople of dif­fer­ent languages but as a one-­way medium for “conveying” the ideas of a man who is undoubtedly Eu­ro­pean “to foreigners.” This unidirectional model of “universal” communication could help spread Western ideas and pro­g ress across the globe and, more locally, aid Britain in its military and economic domination of India: “I scarcely dare to foretell,” the essay continues, “that a communication by Telegraphs between Eu­rope and the East Indies ­w ill one day be established, and that its effects w ­ ill be more beneficial to Eu­rope than mono­poly or conquest.”31 Reading Edgeworth’s “Lame Jervas” in the context of t­ hese collaborative essays about the telegraph—­which formed part of a larger national effort to recast the technology as ideologically and culturally British rather than French—­t he novella’s cele­bration of its titular inventor’s ingenuity works to reassert Britain’s supremacy in terms of both technological prowess and morality, linking the two in the pro­cess. From the beginning of the tale, interest in technology and talent with machines indicate upright character and moral virtue. Indeed, when we encounter Mr. Y, one of Jervas’s many benevolent employers, technology serves as the focal point in a scene of domestic affection: “I found the good old gentleman and some of his friends in his study, with his c­ hildren about him; one l­ ittle chap on his knee,

132

D e v e n M . Pa r k e r

another climbing on the arm of his chair, and two bigger lads w ­ ere busy looking at a glass tube, which he was shewing them when I came in.”32 In the context of this tableau, the glass tube—­later revealed to be a thermometer—­ appears not just as a scientific tool but as a sign of filial care. Mr. Y is revealed to be a virtuous man who values his machines and inventions not simply b ­ ecause they increase his profits and improve workers’ productivity but also b ­ ecause they elevate the mind and foster fellow feeling. When the uneducated Jervas enters his study, he says, “[Mr.  Y] saw that I gazed, with vast curiosity, at several objects in the room, which w ­ ere new to me.”33 Showing him the thermometer, Jervas continues, “Mr. Y—­took ­great pains to shew me how, and on what occasions, this instrument might be useful.”34 The gentleman’s patience with Jervas and willingness to exhibit his devices teach the younger man to trust him and, eventually, to model himself ­after him. Taking Mr. Y’s advice to “make himself useful,” Jervas decides to “make a sort of model of the tin-­mine” for the amusement of his master’s ­children.35 ­After Jervas exhibits his mechanical mine to the f­amily, Mr. Y praises him and encourages further technological pursuits in the ser­vice of Jervas’s self-­improvement, gifting the young man with a magnifying glass. Beginning with this invention, Jervas’s technological skill is what allows him to rise through society’s ranks, eventually becoming a gentleman despite his low status at birth. Mr. Y secures him a job as an assistant to a lecturer who travels the country exhibiting “models of the machines used in manufactories” for the amusement and education of gentlemen.36 Initially, the lecturer treats Jervas with disdain ­because of Jervas’s lack of formal education and low birth; however, this changes when, once again, Jervas’s knack for technology and science endears him to his new employer. Recalling an experiment with metal that his master had conducted, Jervas discovers a guinea covered in quicksilver that the man had mistaken for a shilling, causing the lecturer to show him kindness. Jervas’s mechanical exhibitions eventually lead him to meet a director of the East India Com­pany. In the manner of his other employer, the man recognizes both Jervas’s technological talent and moral integrity—­which, again, go hand in hand—­ and offers him a place teaching at Dr. Bell’s school for orphans in Madras. Before departing, Jervas learns that his first employer, Mr. R, has sent him a farewell gift in the form of vari­ous scientific inventions to bring on his journey. Th ­ ese include “two small globes, siphons, prisms, an air-­gun and an air-­pump, a speaking trumpet, a small apparatus for showing the gases, . . . ​small balloon, and a portable telegraph, in the form of an umbrella.”37 This cata­log of inventions that Jervas brings to India serves as evidence of his employer’s kindness, Jervas’s talent, and, above all, a reminder of the many inventions that British men of science, like Lovell Edgeworth, had pioneered and pop­u­lar­ized during this time. When Jervas arrives in India with the inventions, Dr. Bell is impressed by his knowledge and proposes that Jervas travel as part of a diplomatic mission to the nearby court at Seringapatam to “exhibit some new won­ders” for the entertainment of Tippoo Sultan.38 Serving as an ambassador for his country, Jervas selects the inventions he thinks w ­ ill most impress and intimidate the foreign ruler: “I packed up my speaking trumpet,

T e l e g r a p h i c S u p r e m a c y i n “ L a m e J e r va s ”

133

my apparatus for freezing ­water, and that for exhibiting the gasses, my balloons and telegraph, and with ­these and my model of the tin-­mine . . . ​I set out with two of his eldest scholars upon our expedition.”39 When Jervas meets Tippoo Sultan, he is disgusted by the ruler’s wrath, greed, and arrogance. Like other works of the 1790s set in India, Tipu Sultan’s “oriental despotism” serves to justify British imperialism at a time when, argues Kate Teltscher, “challenges to British power ­were real.”40 Along with France’s perceived military gains over Britain that si­mul­ta­neously occurred on the continent, Teltscher explains how “the sultanate of Mysore, during its period of expansion u ­ nder Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, seriously shook British authority in the south. Placed in this context, emphatic assertions of British invulnerability sound more like attempts to bolster national confidence.”41 Stories like Edgeworth’s thus promote “confidence boosting images of British rule constructed in the face of such threats,” putting forth “anxious assertions of power.”42 Tipu Sultan represented a threat to the East India Com­pany’s military and economic power in India thanks in part to his technological prowess and integration of state-­of-­the-­art military devices at a time when, as we have seen, Britain took up such advances at a relatively slow pace compared to other nations. The ruler was a pioneer of artillery, introducing rockets with iron tubes that enabled higher thrust and longer range, a design that vastly outstripped the outdated models used by the East India Com­pany and that would eventually be used by the British themselves in the Napoleonic Wars. Tipu Sultan’s promotion of technology also extended to automaton entertainments like the ones Jervas creates. As a show of his power, the ruler—­also known as the “Tiger of Mysore”—­commissioned a life-­size mechanical tiger, which, with help of a spring, mauled a British soldier. ­These realities, coupled with the fact that Tipu Sultan was a close ally of France—­ “one of the aspects of Tipu’s power which most alarmed the British,” writes Teltscher—­illuminate the insecurity that pervades Edgeworth’s portrayal of British technological prowess.43 When Jervas exhibits his inventions to the court, The apparatus for freezing, which we then exhibited, seemed to please [Tippoo Sultan]; but I observed that he was, during a g­ reat part of the time whilst I was explaining it, intent upon something ­else; and no sooner had I done speaking than he caused to be produced the condensing engines, made by himself, which . . . ​he said spouted ­water higher than any of ours. The sultan, I perceived, was much more intent upon displaying his small stock of mechanical knowledge than upon increasing it; and the mixture of vanity and ignorance, which he displayed upon this and many subsequent occasions, considerably lessened the awe . . . ​in my mind. Sometimes he would put himself in competition with me, to show his courtiers his superiority; but failing in ­these attempts, he would then treat me as a species of mechanic juggler, who was fit only to exhibit for the amusement of his court. When he saw my speaking-­trumpet, which was made of copper, he at first looked at it with g­ reat scorn, and ordered his trumpeters to show me theirs, which ­were made of silver. . . . ​But, upon trial, mine was found to be far superior to the sultan’s.44

134

D e v e n M . Pa r k e r

­ ere, Jervas’s machines—­his freezing apparatus and speaking trumpet—­are conH tinually asserted to be more advanced and effective than Tippoo’s. While Jervas purports to have come to the palace with pedagogical aims, Tippoo sees his demonstrations for what they ­really are: per­for­mances of cultural superiority. As Jervas displays his technologies, he accuses the sultan of d ­ oing the same: rather than passively absorbing Jervas’s superior knowledge, Tippoo displays his knowledge in turn. Jervas hastily assures the reader, however, that even though Tippoo possesses similar instruments, the British inventions are “far superior.” As the ste­reo­ typical Oriental despot—­a role in which Edgeworth casts him—­Tippoo eventually acknowledges that Jervas’s toys are better and, like a child, must have them: “He accepted [the speaking trumpet] with the eagerness of a child who has begged and obtained a new plaything.”45 Yet, even as Tippoo’s “vanity and ignorance” disgust Jervas, the En­glish inventor has succeeded in his efforts to spread British technologies and ideas, a crucial aspect of the nation’s imperial proj­ect. Importing Britishness into India by way of his technologies, Jervas asserts his nation’s supremacy to the ruler who, in real­ity, rendered it most insecure. The technology that Tippoo desires more than all o ­ thers is Jervas’s portable telegraph. Unlike the freezing apparatus or the speaking trumpet, this device, we learn, is unfamiliar to the despot. In Tippoo’s eyes, the telegraph is the crown jewel of technological advancement. Whereas the governments of Britain and Ireland ­were slow to implement the invention, the fictional Tippoo immediately seizes upon it. Speaking with Prince Abdul Calie, Tippoo’s son and one of the princes famously taken hostage by the British years ­earlier, Jervas explains how the idea to exhibit the telegraph first came to him: [The prince] then said to me, “The sultan, my f­ ather, is at this time so intent upon preparations for war, that even I should despair of being listened to on any other subject. But you have in your possession, as I recollect, what might be useful to him ­either in war or peace; and if you desire it, I ­will speak of this machine to the sultan.” . . . ​He explained to me that he meant my portable telegraph, which would be of infinite use to Tippoo in conveying ­orders of intelligence across the deserts. . . . ​A few hours ­a fter this conversation, I was summoned into the sultan’s presence. His impatience to make trial of the telegraphs was excessive; and I . . . ​instantly became a person of the greatest importance. The trial of the telegraphs succeeded beyond even my expectations; and the sultan was in a species of ecstasy on the occasion.46

Like other depictions of Tippoo, his sons are portrayed as Eu­ro­pean in their calm, civilized demeanors, perhaps having learned British manners ­after spending time as hostages of the East India Com­pany.47 With insight into his despotic f­ ather and admiration for Jervas, Abdul Calie suggests that his f­ ather might appreciate the telegraph, showing that the prince is civilized b ­ ecause he can appreciate the machine’s value beyond its military use, just as Edgeworth and Lovell Edgeworth had argued in their Royal Society essay. Tippoo, too, immediately realizes the ingenuity of Jervas’s telegraphs, elevating the inventor to a status of “greatest importance.” In light

T e l e g r a p h i c S u p r e m a c y i n “ L a m e J e r va s ”

135

of the real-­life Tipu Sultan’s alliance with France, this scene reads as a warning about the dangers of telegraphy in the hands of Britain’s enemies, particularly when Lovell Edgeworth’s own countrymen w ­ ere reluctant to take up the technology— as Joanna Wharton puts it, Edgeworth warns us that “if the British did not take up such innovations, their enemies would.”48 At the same time, Edgeworth’s description of Tippoo’s ecstasy upon witnessing the telegraph trial serves to celebrate Jervas’s—­and Lovell Edgeworth’s—­distinctly British invention. Even the sultan, who previously tried to downplay the ingenuity of the inventor’s instruments, cannot ignore the brilliance of this British machine. While Jervas does not civilize the tyrant, he does succeed in building an alliance with him, where other British emissaries had been unsuccessful. By introducing the telegraph to Tippoo’s court, Jervas does not aid the ­enemy so much as he ensures that any power that Tippoo derives from the telegraph network has been the result of Britain’s cultural supremacy. “Lame Jervas’s” repre­sen­ta­tion of the telegraph overcompensates for the real­ity of what Ashley Cohen calls “the global Jacobin crisis,” the period in the 1790s when Tipu Sultan, France, and other radical powers across the world threatened British security and national interests.49 Instead, Edgeworth offers us a version of real-­life events in which Britain clearly has the upper hand in both foreign influence and technological advancement, once again rewriting the telegraph’s origin story in order to divorce it from Jacobinism. Echoing ­those ­earlier news reports that insisted on the British origins of the telegraph—as well as Edgeworth’s essays penned with her ­father—­her imagining of the telegraph’s introduction in India makes clear that the idea for the invention, if not its practical application, first came from a British mind. Yet, in the scene that follows, Edgeworth also offers a warning about the dangers of telegraphic technology in the hands of a despot like Tipu—­and, by extension, the French. During the initial trial of the telegraphs, Tippoo goes into a rage and nearly kills one of his enslaved men ­a fter the man incorrectly transmits a message: I had previously instructed Saheb in what he was to do; but, from want of practice, he made some m ­ istake, which threw Tippoo into such a transport of passion, that he instantly ordered the slave’s head to be cut off! a sentence which would infallibly have been executed, if I had not represented that it would be expedient to suffer his head to remain on his shoulders till the message was delivered by his telegraph; ­because t­ here was no one pre­sent who could immediately supply his place. Saheb then read off his message without making any new blunder; and the moment the exhibition was over, I threw myself at the feet of the sultan, and implored him to p ­ ardon Saheb. I was not likely at this moment to be refused such a trifle! Saheb was pardoned.50

Sharon Alker has argued that this scene, and the story as a ­whole, warn of the dangers of technologies like the telegraph falling into the wrong hands: “the story suggests that to prevent the destructive force of dangerous technologies in the hands of ‘fanatics’ and ‘criminals,’ technological innovation must be carefully

136

D e v e n M . Pa r k e r

­ arnessed to diminish its danger.”51 At the same time, however, Edgeworth nullih fies this concern about Tippoo’s potential to use the telegraph for destruction by suggesting that the ruler’s barbarity—­his readiness to decapitate Saheb for making a transmission error—­might perhaps derail the ruler’s successful adoption of a telegraph network. If Tippoo’s order had been carried out, he would have executed the man even though “­t here was no one pre­sent who could immediately supply his place” in the network. It is only thanks to Jervas’s intervention that the successful trial of the machine takes place, casting doubt on Tippoo’s ability to effectively make use of this invention. In this moment, the ruler’s bloodlust echoes ­those newspaper reports of French mob vio­lence—­complete with beheadings—­ that accompanied articles about the Jacobin radicals’ successful telegraph installation. As though responding to concerns generated by such reports, ­here Edgeworth effectively quashes anxiety about telegraphs in the hands of violent leaders by suggesting that ­these leaders’ brutality might hinder their efficient use of the technology. Once again, Edgeworth posits morality and benevolence—­embodied by Jervas—as necessary for the effective use of technology. Edgeworth’s depiction of the telegraph echoes the arguments of t­hose writers, including her ­father, who sought to evacuate the telegraph of radicalism by reimagining its origins; she also furthers this mission by reinscribing the technology itself with Enlightenment values. Tippoo Sultan views the telegraph only as a weapon, no dif­fer­ent from his rockets and artillery. Prince Abdul Calie and Jervas, meanwhile, understand that the technology is intended for times of war and peace—­that, ultimately, it is a tool for enlightened communication that transcends cultural barriers, as Edgeworth and her ­father had ­earlier claimed. In inscribing the telegraph with Jervas’s values and suggesting that Tippoo misuses the invention, Edgeworth renders this technology safe, legible, and moral. The novella thus assuages fears that the telegraph would enable a physical and ideological French invasion of Britain—­fears that persist in the pre­sent as with the controversy about Huawei—by ultimately suggesting that lit­er­a­ture has the power to determine the meanings, and possibly even the uses, of technologies.

notes 1.  Matthew S. Schwartz, “Huawei Sues U.S. a­ fter Congress Bans Government Purchase of Its Equipment,” NPR, March  7, 2019, https://­w ww​.­npr​.­org ​/­2019​/­03​/­07​/­700989603​/­huawei​ -­sues​-­u​-­s​-­a fter​-­congress​-­bans​-­government​-­purchase​-­of​-­its​-­equipment. 2.  John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, Public Law 115-232, 115th Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office, August 13, 2018). 3.  Ian Black, “NSA Spying Scandal: What We Have Learned,” The Guardian, June 10, 2013, https://­w ww​.­t heguardian​.­c om​/­w orld​/­2 013​/­j un​/­10​/­n sa​-­s pying​-­s candal​-­w hat​-­w e​-­h ave​ -­learned. 4.  Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Paul Lewis, David Pegg, Sam Cutler, Nina Lakhani, and Michael Safi, “Revealed: Leak Uncovers Global Abuse of Cyber-­Surveillance Weapon,” The Guardian, July 18, 2021, https://­w ww​.­t heguardian​.­com​/­world​/­2021​/­jul​/­18​/­revealed​-­leak​-­un​ ­covers​-g­ lobal​-­abuse​-­of​-­c yber​-­surveillance​-­weapon​-­nso​-­group​-­pegasus. 5.  See Mary Fairclough, “The Telegraph: Radical Transmission in the 1790s,” Eighteenth-­ Century Life 37, no. 2 (2013): 26–52; and Joanna Wharton, “Maria Edgeworth and the Telegraph,” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 31, no. 6 (2020): 747–765.

T e l e g r a p h i c S u p r e m a c y i n “ L a m e J e r va s ”

137

6.  As Aileen Douglas points out, “Lame Jervas” is loosely based on the life of William Smith, a student of the inventor and educator Andrew Bell. Douglas, Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 7.  To distinguish between Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, I refer to the former as “Edgeworth” and the latter as “Lovell Edgeworth.” For a thorough account of Maria Edgeworth’s role in co-­authoring ­t hese essays with her ­father and the influence of the telegraph on her literary techniques, including ­t hose in “Lame Jervas,” see Wharton, “Maria Edgeworth.” 8.  Geoffrey Wilson, The Old Telegraphs (London: Philimore, 1976), 12. 9.  Russell Burns, Communications: An International History of the Formative Years (London: Institute of Electrical Engineers, 2004), 40. 10.  Quoted in ibid., 42. 11.  Ibid., 43. 12.  St. James’s Chronicle or the British Eve­ning Post (London), September 18, 1794. 13.  Courier and Eve­ning Gazette (London), November 21, 1794; Morning Chronicle, November 25, 1794. 14.  Courier and Eve­ning Gazette (London), November 26, 1794. 15.  Morning Post and Fash­ion­able World (London), September 19, 1794. 16.  Fairclough, “The Telegraph,” 30. 17.  Charles Dibdin, A Collection of Songs, Selected from the Works of Mr. Dibdin. To Which Are Added, the Newest and Most Favourite American Patriotic Songs (Philadelphia: Printed by J. Bioren for H. & P. Price, and sold by J. Rice, Baltimore, 1799), 255. 18.  Gentleman’s Magazine 64 (November 1794): 1175–1177. For a thorough discussion of the telegraph in the Gentleman’s Magazine, see Fairclough, “The Telegraph,” 30–31. 19.  Whitehall Eve­ning Post (London), September 27, 1794. 20.  Morning Post (London), November 29, 1794. 21.  Wharton, “Maria Edgeworth,” 750. 22.  Richard Lovell Edgeworth, A Letter to the Right Hon. The Earl of Charlemont, on the Tellograph, and on the Defence of Ireland (London: Printed for J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church Yard, 1797). 23.  Richard Lovell Edgeworth, “An Essay on the Art of Conveying Secret and Swift Intelligence,” Transactions of the Royal Irish Acad­emy 6 (1797): 95–139. 24.  Lovell Edgeworth, A Letter to the Right Hon. The Earl of Charlemont, 4. 25.  Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq. (London: Printed for R. Hunter, 1820), 358. 26.  Lovell Edgeworth, “Secret and Swift Intelligence,” 95. 27.  Ibid., 104–105. 28.  Ibid., 125. 29.  Ibid., 100. 30.  Ibid., 124. 31.  Ibid., 116. 32.  Maria Edgeworth, Popu­l ar Tales (London: Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church-­ yard, by C. Mercier and Co., 1804), 30. 33.  Ibid., 31. 34. Ibid. 35.  Ibid., 36. 36.  Ibid., 48. 37.  Ibid., 63. 38.  Ibid., 72. 39. Ibid. 40. Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: Eu­ro­pean and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 119. 41. Ibid. 42.  Ibid., 111. 43.  Ibid., 249.

138

D e v e n M . Pa r k e r

44. Edgeworth, Popu­lar Tales, 75. 45.  Ibid., 75–76. 46.  Ibid., 88–89. 47. Teltscher, India Inscribed, 249. 48.  Wharton, “Maria Edgeworth,” 758. 49.  Ashley Cohen, “Wage Slavery, Oriental Despotism, and Global ­Labor: Management in Maria Edgeworth’s Popu­lar Tales,” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 55, nos. 2–3 (2014): 193. 50. Edgeworth, Popu­lar Tales, 89–90. 51.  Sharon Alker, “Explosive Potential: Radicals and Chemistry in Maria Edgeworth’s Fiction,” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 22, no. 1 (February 2011): 14. Similarly, Wharton argues that “while invested in an Enlightenment ideology of ‘improvement,’ Edgeworth betrays a degree of caution about the democ­ratization and globalization of scientific knowledge at a time of crisis in Eu­rope” (“Maria Edgeworth,” 749).

chapter 8

•

Percy Shelley, Po­liti­cal Machines, and the Prehistory of the Postliberal Jamison Kantor

I One of the most celebrated accounts of the 2008 global economic collapse came from the former finance journalist and nonfiction writer Michael Lewis. The book was called The Big Short (2010) and, as is typical with Lewis’s writing, it featured protagonists who, by escaping the inertia of the systems in which they had previously operated, end up as rogu­ish heroes.1 Despite the fanfare surrounding The Big Short, most respondents overlooked its original subtitle: Inside the Doomsday Machine. Throughout, Lewis describes the tortuous matrix of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), derivatives, and credit default swaps as an integrated mechanism whose function is unconstrained by any single one of its operators. At vari­ ous points throughout the text, the subprime mortgage lending industry against which the protagonists place their bets is called a “fantastic money machine,” “a machine that turned lead into gold,” and “an unthinking machine that could not stop itself.”2 The conceit that Lewis uses to describe finance capital—­t he fantastical automaton that has broken away from its masters, that is unconstrained from intention (­whether singular or collective), and that is pushing history inexorably ­toward a cataclysmic reckoning—is not l­ imited to his work alone. In their account of the financial crisis, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera called the development of CDOs “a self-­perpetuating machine,” while the epilogue of their book is labeled, fittingly, “Rage at the Machine.”3 Evoking the apocalyptic (as well as literary) register oftentimes used to describe con­temporary high finance, McLean and Nocera’s volume was titled All the Dev­ils Are ­Here (2010), a nod to Ariel’s description of the calamitous shipwreck in The Tempest (1611).4 Scholars of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture have long been interested in the history of this rhe­toric. Having tracked the meta­phors of finance—or “fictitious capital”—­f rom their affiliation with mass mechanical reproduction, 139

140

Ja mison K antor

immateriality and ghostliness, and even gothic narratives (which are replete with the kind of fatalism that the stock market seems to thrust on its participants), the past fifteen years of literary criticism has been fruitful for understanding the cultural forebears of the current regime of transatlantic cap­i­tal­ist accumulation.5 ­These descriptions align with the traits of such a regime: ­labor is detached from capital systematically so that only ­people with money can make money, investment takes on an ever more abstract (or immaterial) quality in an attempt to mitigate risk, and a rising share of the national economy goes to investment vehicles held by a disproportionately small group of investors, leaving the rest of the population to the whims of a speculative market in which they cannot participate. In this essay, however, I propose a dif­fer­ent, but corresponding, hypothesis about the aesthetics of social conditions in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca t­ oday. While critics have focused on the idiom of the self-­governing, paranormal machine—or automaton— to describe the emergent finance economy, ­here I pivot to the modern state, the po­liti­cal formation that has always been tied to finance and the development of real industrial machinery and whose cultural depictions seem to inspire similar repre­sen­ta­tions. In classic po­liti­cal theory, the state—­especially as it incorporated the ideas of republicanism and popu­lar representation—is regularly compared to a machine or mechanism.6 Thomas Hobbes likens the Leviathan, for instance, to an automaton whose motion springs from the consent of the p ­ eople that it represents, while, in The Social Contract (1762), Jean-­Jacques Rousseau argues that “the po­liti­cal machine” of the state gets its energy in more galvanic ways, as the sovereign taps into the “general w ­ ill” of the p ­ eople so as to “legitimise civil undertakings.”7 By the nineteenth ­century, the meta­phor was in common parlance and was oftentimes used as a way to disparage unresponsive, “inorganic” leadership. Following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the Morning Post reported that the emperor’s “most ardent admirers and supporters, . . . ​convinced that nothing less than a miracle can restore their idol again to their embraces, ­will affect to consider him as an automaton, by whose motions they formerly w ­ ere attracted, but whose springs are now 8 disjointed and destroyed.” But if the i­ magined order of the liberal state had been signified traditionally as a machine energized by the constituency that it serves, I want to pose a critical question related to our current, perilous moment: What happens when this po­liti­cal machine starts to exclude ­t hose whom it is supposed to represent, shedding the need for repre­sen­ta­tion and transforming into a self-­ contained, self-­perpetuating apparatus? Like the “spectral” value produced by finance capital, ­w ill a modern state that has moved past the traditions of liberalism continue to exude the penumbra—or residue—of legitimacy without d ­ oing anything substantive to respond to the general ­w ill? I advance this inquiry by turning to one of the most daring aesthetic, scientific, and po­liti­cal minds of the nineteenth ­century, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Known, among other ­t hings, for his influential protest lyr­ics—­and for his pronouncement that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World”—­Shelley and his writing have been defined through a similar terminology of mechanism and spectral

Sh el l ey a n d th e Pr ehistory of th e Postliber a l

141

energy.9 Of Shelley’s final lyric fragment, The Triumph of Life (1822), William Hazlitt wrote that the poem was “full of fancy and of fire, with glowing allusions and wild machinery.”10 A comparable rhe­toric of machinery and techne inhabits perhaps the most influential con­temporary essay on the poet, Paul De Man’s “Shelley Disfigured.” For De Man, the “mechanical operation” of Shelley’s lyricism reveals the limits of intentionality within any text, limits against which Shelley seemed to react.11 As Marc Redfield and Orrin Wang have shown, the arbitrary nature of signification in Shelley—of “the mechanical iteration of inscription”—­suggests the futility of social change but also the chance for a radical revision of the ­f uture.12 This dialectic in Shelley’s poetry between mechanism and the antimechanical thus articulates a kind of politics. Indeed, the range of pos­si­ble signification within the poetry ratifies the broad spectrum of po­liti­cal ideology wherein Shelley has been located: for some critics, the poet is an enlightened aristocrat; for ­others, he is a cautious reformist; and still ­others consider him a radical proto-­Marxist.13 Given the huge range of Shelley’s insights on public life, I argue that a pair of l­ ater poems—­The Mask of Anarchy (1819) and The Triumph of Life—­registers the phenomenon of the po­l iti­cal machine in three ways. First, the poems highlight Shelley’s fascination with ­actual mechanical engineering—­especially the construction of steam-­powered vehicles—as a science that could harness the power of perpetual motion, or movement without h ­ uman involvement. Second, the poems amalgamate Shelley’s attraction to modern vehicular technology with his critique of the idea of “state machinery” and its tenuous connection to the p ­ eople who give it legitimacy. H ­ ere, I turn to a specific genre: the masque. Often linked to the early modern period, the masque represented civic virtues in a kind of mechanical pageant. Featuring an automatic pro­cession of allegorical figures signifying princi­ ples such as love, justice, and law, the masque authorized the abstraction of the state by exhibiting its personalized, humanistic nature to the public, which might be considered “happy passengers” on the moving vehicle of sovereignty. However, if the poem can be read as a diabolic parody—or an antimasque, as a host of scholars have suggested—­then it also heralds the rise of the dominant regime of modernity, liberal republicanism. Glorified a de­cade ­later by supporters of the Reform Bill, The Mask of Anarchy envisions what Jeremy Bentham in 1817 called “the machine of government,” a colossal, advancing apparatus that si­mul­ta­neously represents and disciplines its subjects, incorporating them into its own instrumental logic.14 However, in my third move, I argue that The Triumph of Life, the more speculative of both lyr­ics, proposes a stage of governance that may be more advanced than any ­under that we have lived, what I dub the “postliberal.” Shelley’s final poem foresees the separation of this governing vehicle—­whether it represents or disciplines its subjects—­from the ­people over whom it is supposed to preside. Nevertheless, the postliberal state continues to proj­ect a media spectacle of governance whose legitimacy becomes unimportant to the governed. At the risk of undue complexity, I argue that ­these lyr­ics stage si­mul­ta­neously ­these many temporalities: the archaic world of the courtly masque, a near f­ uture governed by liberal institutions, and the distant ­f uture when the liberal state has been abandoned. Indeed,

142

Ja mison K antor

Shelley’s flattening of historical signification into formal shapes—­what Tilottama Rajan has called “the reconstruction of appearances”—is a well-­recognized hallmark of his poetics.15 This reduction of temporal categories into spatial ones brings to mind Fredric Jameson’s renowned thesis in Postmodernism (1991).16 But Jameson’s more recent remarks about late capitalism are most applicable h ­ ere: instead of concentrating on the exploitation of workers in modern Western economies, Jameson says that we should attend to their exclusion from t­ hose economies, as the unemployed, or “industrial reserve army of l­ abor,” come to constitute more grist for capital’s churning mill.17 In conjunction with our daily economic real­ity, this essay posits a new po­liti­cal concept: the state of exclusion, wherein formerly repre­sen­ta­tional systems shed the capacity to respond to citizens in a substantive way. (My formulation is the obverse of Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception,” where the sovereign retains the privilege to act outside the rule of law). However, as is the case with all Shelleyan dichotomies, if ­there is darkness, t­ here is also light. At the end, I lay out three potential paths forward detailed by The Triumph of Life: a reversion to civics based on pure aestheticism, an interregnum when p ­ eople abandon a feckless po­liti­cal system and concentrate merely on their own livelihoods, and a utopian ­f uture when a refashioned po­liti­cal machine fades into the background and allows us to pursue higher goals for our lives.

II For most con­temporary readers, the epithet “po­liti­cal machine” recalls the end of the nineteenth ­century, not the beginning. The phrase evokes an ornate system based on patronage and hierarchy, a convoluted bureaucracy that can be circumvented through insider knowledge and, above all, the f­ ree flow of money into campaign coffers. The po­liti­cal machines of the United States, for instance, w ­ ere infamous for influencing electoral politics and partisan affiliations. In New York City, the Tammany Hall organ­ization—­a nd its notorious leader, Boss Tweed—­ played an outsized role in developing the u ­ nion and antimonopolist vote during the Gilded Age.18 On the other side, the Republican “whiskey ring” centered in St.  Louis during the 1870s employed machine politics for the purposes of tax evasion.19 However, in Eu­rope at the turn of the nineteenth ­century, the concept of the po­liti­cal machine was broader and, perhaps, more fluid, as it moved across ideologies and featured in the writings of both radicals and reactionaries. At the conclusion of The Rights of Man (1791), Thomas Paine invoked the Enlightenment notion of a mechanism infused with metaphysical energy, declaring that the vast “machinery of Government” could be moved by two competing spirits: Reason or Ignorance.20 Just two years e­ arlier, however, Jean-­Paul Marat eschewed this theoretical version of the machine. In an instance of revolutionary realpolitik, Marat proclaimed, “the po­liti­cal machine can only be wound up by vio­lence, just as the air can only be cleared by a storm.”21 If Marat prefigures the guillotine—­and Napo-

Sh el l ey a n d th e Pr ehistory of th e Postliber a l

143

leon’s march through Europe—in the first part of his analogy, then the second part revises the Enlightenment faith in reason as a guide to civil affairs. It is not the spirit of reason that fuels the machine of po­liti­cal modernity but instead the unstoppable motion of nature, which Marat—­consummate journalist of the revolution—­ would subsequently liken to mass media, a similarly immaterial force that can “clear the air” and guide public opinion. “Do not be alarmed by words,” pronounced Marat; “it is only by force that we can make liberty triumph and assure Public Safety.”22 As pamphlets and reports flew back and forth across Eu­rope in the 1790s, a savvy rhetorician like Edmund Burke could thus be praised for knowing “more of the po­liti­cal machine than a recluse phi­los­o­pher,” as Hazlitt put it, and for “speculat[ing] more profoundly on its princi­ples and general results than a mere politician.”23 Less interested in the princi­ples and customs of the state than in its empirical design, Bentham conceived of government in 1817 as an apparatus that, like the animal body, must constantly remain in motion, for “when motion ceases, the body dies.”24 To keep the biomechanical state from “falling to pieces,” t­ here must be ceaseless, dynamic interaction between its representatives and their interests.25 One generation ­after Burke, Bentham theorized that a legislature could be designed as a self-­regulating colossus. But it must avoid behaving as “an automaton for signing papers,” lest it invite corruption by appropriating for itself increasingly more money from the public trust.26 However, this interconnected apparatus of civic institutions, public opinion, and practical activity struck some commenters as artificial and restrictive. Offering a classic Romantic critique of mechanism, a young G.W.F. Hegel had called for citizens—­“ ­free h ­ uman beings [treated] as if they w ­ ere cogs in a machine”—to transcend the state entirely, a directive appropriated fifty years l­ater by Karl Marx.27 But Hegel’s radicalism did not last. ­After Waterloo, the phi­los­o­pher anticipated the “realist” liberalism that would eventually emerge as the dominant social structure, arguing in The Philosophy of Right (1820) that the po­liti­cal machine should merely be revised into a “system of the ethical world” that concretized the “rational life” of citizens as a collective.28 Of course, if Hegel urged citizens to accept the state and infuse it with new vitality, then he merely replaced a mechanical version of the po­liti­cal apparatus with an organic one.29 Marx, in just one example of his manifold inversions of Hegel, noted in the final pages of The Eigh­teenth Brumaire (1852) that “all revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it.”30 While this was a tragic pronouncement on bourgeois society ­a fter the failure of the 1848 revolutions, it was also perhaps an indictment of Hegel’s promotion of a single teleology of history. For Marx, the po­liti­cal machine was not just a structural formation but also an epochal one, a vehicle for one unvarying timeline of h ­ uman development. Indeed, by the mid-­nineteenth ­century, the concept of the perpetually moving state was not just affiliated with a Benthamite dance of interests.31 It was also taking on a real, material appearance in the shape of mass transportation, especially the railways, a monumental technical achievement that was, in part, made pos­si­ble by the state.32 For the phi­los­o­pher, the once-­abstract state machine could be literalized by growing

144

Ja mison K antor

mechanical (or mechanized) national infrastructure: the state, in its pretenses to represent the masses, “snatched [common interests] from . . . ​society’s members . . . ​ and made [them objects] of government activity, . . . ​t he railways, the national wealth and the national University of France.”33 In other words, Marx characterizes nineteenth-­century liberal republicanism as a self-­directed, autonomous vehicle that traverses one unvarying path of ­human history, remaining constant even when it is confronted by the passengers it carries. Both a concept and a concrete phenomenon, Marx’s perpetual machine of state combines the technological advancement of publicly financed moving vehicles with a long-­standing meta­phor for the liberal po­liti­cal order. Indeed, it is both the civic meta­phors and material real­ity of Eu­rope that Marx wants to transform when, in the introduction of the essay, he calls for a “poetry . . . ​from the ­future” that ­will supersede the revolutionary language of days gone by.34 Indeed, the poet, if not the poetry, of the ­future may have been in the past. Writing more than thirty years before The Eigh­teenth Brumaire, Shelley had taken a keen interest in the industrial science of transportation and—in the syncretism typical of the polymath poet—­how machines w ­ ere inevitably influenced by the po­liti­cal milieu in which they w ­ ere designed. No stranger to autonomous vehicles ­either, for years Shelley had represented in his poetry the self-­propelled voyager as an emblem for politics and po­liti­cal awareness. In 1813’s Queen Mab, for example, a flaming, flying chariot pi­lots the speaker across the globe, allowing him an aerial view of global oppression. In Prometheus Unbound, the closet drama that Shelley completed right before The Mask, the winged, “moonlike” “car of the hour,” which conflates time with space, shut­tles mythical figures to a decisive, revolutionary conflict.35 During this period, Shelley was also exchanging letters with Henry Reveley—an engineer and friend of the f­amily—­about a prototype steamboat. Described by the poet in November 1819 as a “prosperous & swift voyager,” the boat had promisingly incorporated a “steam cylinder and air-­pump,” components that Shelley commissioned from Reveley.36 So inspired was the poet by transportation technology that, while writing in Reveley’s lab one day, he linked poetic consciousness itself to an automated engine, “the self-­impelling steam-­wheels of the mind.”37 Although Shelley’s boat never entered the ­water (and the legacy of fatal maritime accidents continues to haunt any account of his life), a similar obsession with vehicular mechanism—­and its ties to a “state machinery” that synthesizes institutions, public repre­sen­ta­tion, and a specific track of pro­gress—­pervades The Mask of Anarchy. As one of the most influential protest poems in the history of British lit­er­a­ture, The Mask was composed in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. During this notorious event, regular and yeoman cavalry rode down ­labor protestors at Manchester’s St. Peter’s Square, killing six and wounding eighty. Shelley’s poem interprets the event as a pro­cession of four diabolical authorities—­Murder, Fraud, Hy­poc­r isy, and Anarchy—­who r­ ide into London, subjugate citizens and institutions to their ­will, and trample “the prostrate multitude” that dares to oppose them.38 They are only s­ topped when an unnamed and nebulous “Shape arrayed in mail” emerges, inspiring protesters to put their bodies on the line in an act of

Sh el l ey a n d th e Pr ehistory of th e Postliber a l

145

­ onviolent re­sis­tance, so that officials, potentially, “return with shame / To the n place from which they came.”39 Composed with basic couplets and tight, four-­to five-­line stanzas of irregular tetrameter verse, the poem was a self-­consciously popu­lar text, one intended to compete with the numerous media repre­sen­ta­tions of the event that had influenced its composition. (Due to l­egal concerns, however, its publication was withheld u ­ ntil 1832, when the poem was subsequently championed by supporters of the Reform Bill.)40 In addition, the repetition of key refrains uttered by the authorities (“i am god, and king, and law”) and the Shape of dissent (“Rise like lions ­after slumber. . . . ​Ye are many—­they are few”) function as mnemonic devices, apothegms that automate thought for readers.41 Indeed, the professional classes depicted in the beginning of the poem echo the authorities’ message mindlessly, “Whispering—­‘thou art Law and God.’ ”42 While the formal details of The Mask have a kind of mechanical regularity, its genre also conveys mechanism and systematic motion. Originally, the masque represented a civil pageant, one intended to personify the governing ideas of society as they descended from the sovereign and to pre­sent ­t hose ideas to the public in a routinized, but nevertheless engaging, order.43 Typically associated with courtly life in the early modern period, the masque had a negative counterpart too, the aptly named “antimasque.” ­Here, audiences ­were presented with the embodiment of rebellious or antisocial qualities that ­were subsequently regulated back into social propriety by the sovereign.44 During the rise of the modern state, both masque and antimasque connected spectacle to moral instruction in order to materialize legitimacy through a distinctly populist aesthetic: the hierarchical control of the sovereign is made horizontal, diffused across dif­fer­ent actors who work in concert with one another to support his/her claim to authority. Shelley’s Mask reproduces the distinctly “lateral” quality of both genres by following its riders along a pa­norama of destruction, ­until the Shape fi­nally halts them and instructs the p ­ eople to disobey their rule. If the poem inverts the traditional masque, it also reproduces, as Amanda Jo Goldstein has noted, a genre that was even more current to the period: eighteenth-­ century didactic poetry in the neo-­Lucretian tradition.45 In ­these texts, the production of “natu­ral histories” accounts for the deep, materialist dimension of po­liti­cal events that are unacknowledged by mere textual or iconographic recapitulation. However, if natu­ral history “amplif[ies] the sensory and affective impacts” that the masque delivers through artifice and pageantry, then both genres rely on a similar repre­sen­ta­tional schema: allegory, or the analogizing of one ­thing to another through a “degree of automaticism,” to use De Man’s famous phrase.46 This imposition of allegory onto historical events turns what was incidental and contingent into a systematic operation of meaning, an engine that regiments the pieces and narrative of public affairs. Even the ethereal Shape—­who is effervescent “as the light of sunny rain” and describes the populace as spectral “heroes of unwritten story”—­ could ultimately signify something purposive: the Hegelian “cunning of reason” working its way through the body politic in a decisive teleology of liberation.47 The iconography of the Shape is also distinctly con­temporary. It appears at first “as a mist” and a “vapor of a vale,” is born aloft by the gaseous energy with which

146

Ja mison K antor

Shelley was fascinated, and passes over the heads of the multitude “as wind . . . ​so fast That they knew the presence t­ here, / And looked,—­but all was empty air.”48 Not just a distant object or divine totem, the Shape also urges onlookers to share its form, specifically by instructing them to view the decomposing bodies of the massacre as a kind of civic fossil fuel that w ­ ill eventually power their movement: soon, says the Shape, “that slaughter to the Nation, / ­Shall steam up like inspiration.”49 As a super­natural technology of social change, the Shape might even resemble an early locomotive: it refigures the heat, steam, and, metal of Shelley’s other imaginary vehicles—­whether in his poetry or in con­temporary prototypes—­into an icon of populist re­sis­tance. And, in its blurry, dynamic motion above the heads of the p ­ eople, the Shape suggests a perpetual ­f uture politics, in which, if we follow its example, history might advance endlessly. Drawing on masque, allegory, and con­temporary engineering, the poem aestheticizes the idea of mechanism employed by postrevolutionary po­liti­cal theory. It is thus a fitting coincidence that ­England’s first railroad—­which opened in 1829, a de­cade ­after the publication of The Mask—­ connected Manchester with its fellow industrial hub, Liverpool.50 As Paul Fyfe argues, by giving passengers a view of the “disparity in po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­tion,” this route may have inspired support for the Reform Bill, which passed in Parliament twenty-­one months ­later.51 To put this another way, The Mask, despite its futurist imagery, suggests a mode of governance that was evolving in Shelley’s day: liberal republicanism, in which citizens are incorporated into a structure of repre­ sen­ ta­ tion that, presumably, responds to their interests. Critics have addressed Shelley’s interpretation of Peterloo as, in Andrew Stauffer’s words, “a contrast for harmonious visions of reconciliation” between the rulers and the ruled.52 This is a fitting description for a protest song in which t­ hose rulers devastate their own p ­ eople (and in which ­those p ­ eople can only use this devastation—­the strategy of nonviolent resistance—as a tactic for reform). But the line between consent and disorder is blurry h ­ ere. The figures that ­ride in to quell dissent are not immediately known by their true names but are themselves clothed in the garb of authority: Murder “had a mask like Castlereagh” (the Tory minister of Parliament who had suppressed rebellion abroad), Fraud was “like Eldon” (the Lord Chancellor responsible for separating Shelley from his ­children), Hy­poc­risy appears “like Sidmouth” (the secretary of internal affairs known for domestic pacification), and Anarchy wears “a kingly crown / And in his grasp a scepter shone.”53 As they ­ride “through E ­ ngland proud and gay,” they are greeted by an “adoring multitude.”54 And when the four figures fi­nally descend on London, the vari­ous representatives of state administration—­“a motley crowd” of soldiers, priests, and l­awyers—­bow “to the earth their pale brows” and afford them access to major institutions, including the Bank of ­England, Parliament, and the Tower of London, that venerable symbol of incarceration.55 The representatives are so arrayed in “glorious triumph” that their true nature is concealed “even to the eyes,” a phrase that conveys the inability of most p ­ eople to see the duplicity of their leaders and, perhaps, the leaders’ self-­delusion. Indeed, it has become a truism to

Sh el l ey a n d th e Pr ehistory of th e Postliber a l

147

say that one of the many meanings of “mask” in Shelley’s poem is the thin mask of liberal modernity worn by the agents of its corruption.56 ­These disguised figures evoke a well-­k nown critique of bourgeois liberalism from the twentieth ­century that was also premised on the idea of po­liti­cal machinery: Louis Althusser’s industrial and repressive state apparatuses, which regulate the practices of citizens through the “soft suppression” of voluntary institutions.57 In other words, The Mask manifests a style of ideology critique in which consent and domination are seen as indistinguishable from each other; it is exemplary of what Jerrold Hogle describes as Shelley’s ability to signify the transference of “past actions or ideologies to predetermine or restrain pre­sent modifications while ­suppressing the a­ctual basis of outdated systems.”58 And yet the common ­people—­embodied by the speaking Shape—­a re already aware of the repressive nature of the administrative structures that supposedly benefit them. The solution recommended by the Shape in a speech that constitutes the second half of the poem is an appeal to “the old laws of E ­ ngland” that w ­ ere originally established by “­children of a wiser day,” to see themselves as “heirs of Glory,” or the entailed inheritors of E ­ ngland’s original Glorious Revolution, and to insist on nonviolent re­sis­ tance, a tactic that can activate a sense of shame in ­t hose who read about the event and, hence, rebuild the cir­cuit of affective nationalism.59 In short, the p ­ eople must reform—­not reject—­t he time-­tested devices of repre­ sen­ta­tion. This can happen if they rescue from corruption an “original” liberalism, set it on the right trajectory once again, and sacrifice their bodies to revive a nationalist sentimentalism that was essential to Whig politics. Of course, the ­people’s ability to refine the state and reincorporate their very bodies into it anticipates yet another twentieth-­century criticism of liberalism, this time from Michel Foucault, who locates modern power, among other areas, in the rise of codified rationalism (governmentality) and the total management of corporeality (biopolitics).60 And yet, even as the poem makes its readers aware of this new regime of modernity—in which phenomena of mass population (“Ye are many, they are few”) and contiguous bodies (“Hand to hand, and foot to foot”) require administration— it also prepares them to maintain and perfect such a regime.61 This ability to improve the repre­sen­ta­tional capacities of the liberal order has an aesthetic correlative: the population must don new, more accurate masks representing the old virtues of “Love, . . . ​Science, Poetry, . . . ​Thought, . . . ​Spirit, Patience, [and] Gentleness.”62 Hence, the masque—as a generic embodiment of the po­liti­cal machine—­re-­forms itself into a fresh pageant where abstract values are more tightly bound to their material signifiers. Even the most famous line in the poem (arguably the most famous line of Shelley’s ­career), “Rise like lions ­a fter slumber,” urges a garish metonymy between the common man and the Barbary lion, the most prolific symbol of En­glish heraldry and, hence, national clout.63 By recovering conservative values and fitting them with new masks, the poem shows the possibility of the success of the repre­sen­ta­t ional state, not its failure. In ­doing so, Shelley dramatizes Bentham’s 1817 plan to radically reform,

148

Ja mison K antor

not disassemble, the state machine, just as he represents the “essential movement”—­ the single direction—of modern liberation described by Hegel one year l­ater.64 Alternatively, one could say that The Mask stages Marx’s claim that all previous revolutions have simply refined the machine of politics. Indeed, when Shelley’s publisher, Leigh Hunt, remarked that the poem would confront “the brazen masks of power” worn by the Tories, Shelley might have responded that the point of this confrontation was not to remove the masks but to make them less brazen and more au­t hen­t ic.65 The reformist heritage of the poem is alive and well. In 2017, the ­Labour Party manifesto featured the slogan “for the many, not the few,” riffing on the lyric’s central refrain, and proposed “rail electrification and expansion across the ­whole country,” a callback to the poem’s evocation of the emergence of the liberal state by, in part, its involvement with the machines of public transportation.66 Astonishingly, Shelley’s next masque pre-­empts the debate over the efficacy of reformism and pushes it even further. The Triumph of Life intuits a radical ­f uture when the pretense of reformism is maintained without any substantive content. Pessimistic, intricate, and phantasmagoric, the lyric hypothesizes a situation in which the machines of modern politics whir faster and faster to stay in one place.

III In 1821, one year before Shelley composed his Triumph, artists ­were still reacting to Peterloo and the emergence of a reactionary domestic agenda. Much like Shelley, they would invoke the image of an unstoppable mechanism of po­liti­cal oppression to advance their arguments. In a “partial revival” of Daniel Defoe’s verse satire De Jure Divino (1706), the dissenter and satirist William Hone produced The Right Divine of Kings to Govern Wrong (1821), a sardonic poem that described all monarchs as indifferent automatons.67 “The ­people like not his mechanic race,” Hone wrote a year ­after the ascension of George IV to the throne. “They see no greatness in his youthful face.”68 (One suspects a dig ­here about the king’s legendary fondness for luxury and fashion.)69 Dedicated to the Holy Alliance—­a co­a li­ tion formed by Austria, Prus­sia, and Rus­sia to stem the tide of secularism and liberal governance following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815—­Hone’s poem contained illustrations from the prolific cartoonist George Cruikshank. The title page, for instance, features a Saxon-­looking king who stares into the foreground blankly, while priests anoint him with the “Oil of Steel” and the incense of “Discord,” details that link the accouterments of divine right to the by-­products of con­ temporary industrial engines: fossil fuel and steam. Adorned in the first image with a German zweihander sword and two nooses (figure 8.1), Cruikshank’s king is even more mechanized and belligerent in a final cartoon, which depicts a lumbering iron ­giant (composed entirely of cannons and shot) who wields a torch and a sword to cut down radicals, signified by a Phrygian cap mounted on a pike (figure 8.2). In this image, however, the zweihander has been replaced with a British cavalry saber, and the Saxon war helmet is switched out for an En­glish crown. This

Figure 8.1. ​The title page of William Hone’s The Right Divine of Kings to Govern Wrong!, featuring a cartoon from George Cruikshank.

Figure 8.2. ​The final page of Hone’s satire, with another cartoon from Cruikshank.

Sh el l ey a n d th e Pr ehistory of th e Postliber a l

151

automaton sovereign no longer requires divine sanction for its power. It is now blessed by British industrial might. Cruikshank’s images express a convention regularly found in Shelley’s l­ater poetry and poetics: the old, even mythological, forms of tyranny reappear in the guise of modern industrial (or instrumentalist) rationality—­a singular force that has nevertheless been separated from any one source or intention. T ­ oday, the critique of the instrumentality of culture is most often associated with the Frankfurt School, especially Theodor Adorno, whose legacy redounds in the work of con­ temporary Shelleyans. According to scholars, the poet prefigures Adorno’s contribution to post-­Marxist critique: Shelley is skeptical of the calculating instinct often associated with Enlightenment radicalism, but, like Adorno, he also posits a radical aesthetics that can move beyond instrumentality.70 This sensitivity to the influence of mechanism is not just discursive but also appears at the level of the trope. Nearly fifty years before De Man noted the automated quality of Shelley’s verse, William Empson perceived that the poet’s work was characterized by “self-­inwoven” similes, comparisons that refer ceaselessly to other places in the text—or to parts of the very simile in question.71 Invoking the combination of divinity and machinery found in Hone’s 1821 satire, Empson goes on to say that “Form [in Shelley’s poetry] is its own justification; it sustains itself, like God, by the fact that it exists.”72 To put it another way, the lyric autonomy for which Shelley is known has regularly been connected to his trepidation with, or resignation to, automation and autoreferentiality. Shelley’s final poem, The Triumph of Life, proposes that such autoreferentiality—­ the pro­cess whereby ­t hings perpetuate themselves—­could become the very model of modern politics in the ­f uture. Composed abroad in Italy ­after years of domestic upheaval in Britain, The Triumph is a highly abstract dream vision built on terza rima stanzas that are, in part, an homage to Dante’s Divine Comedy (1320). It is also filled with imagery seemingly derived from Shelley’s prior aesthetic engagements with liberal governance. As Shelley’s autobiographical speaker slips into a “trance of wondrous thought,” he encounters a blind, Janus-­faced char­i­ot­eer hurtling across the sky, a bleak version of Shelley’s prolific motif of the automated vehicle as a symbol for unstoppable, unreflective pro­gress.73 Guided by the ghost of Rousseau, the speaker then encounters a series of historical spirits—­Bacon, Voltaire, Kant, and Napoleon—­chained to the car, a commentary on, among other ­t hings, the simultaneous inevitability and impotence of the Enlightenment proj­ ect, which includes the domination of the natu­ral world by modern science and technology. ­These spirits are not alone, however. They are surrounded by a jubilant and “captive multitude” cheering on the pro­cession of the char­i­ot­eer as “some conqueror’s advance.”74 Numbering a “million with fierce song and maniac dance,” the multitude harks back to the supporters of tyrannical institutions featured in The Mask of Anarchy, now extrapolated to the greater populace.75 Fi­nally, ­after an encounter with the intangible figure of “shape all light”—­perhaps a literalization of reason, as well as the dichotomy of creation and disruption that it pre­sents—­the lyric breaks

152

Ja mison K antor

off, ending in the m ­ iddle of a response to an enigmatic question posed by the speaker: “Then, what is Life?”76 Left unfinished due to Shelley’s death, The Triumph is a classic Romantic fragment poem that keeps its readers suspended. Through its abrupt ending, it inspires the perpetual forward motion created by the piece’s interlocking terza rima. Harking back to Cruikshank and Hone’s The Right Divine of Kings, this description indicates a similar merger of industrial and divine activity found in repre­sen­ta­tions of British tyranny during the Royalist revival following Waterloo.77 But the chariot also drags a cheering, jubilant multitude along with it. Returning to the proto-­locomotive imagery of The Mask—in which Shelley converted the steam power and perpetual motion of early transportation technology into a vehicular Shape that inspired the populace to revolt against injustice—­the chariot now signals a diabolical inversion of po­liti­cal repre­sen­ta­ tion, where the ­people are bonded to their leaders by force, not by consent. Even deep abstractions within the poem reconsider the semiotics of Shelley’s previous poem. Revising the populist Shape from The Mask, who stops the “ghastly masquerade” in its tracks and provides the p ­ eople with a template for f­ uture reform, is the “shape all light.”78 Unlike the solid Shape, the “shape all light” is ceaselessly protean, assuming a host of forms through the figure of simile—­“ like a willow,” “as . . . ​slant morning beams that fell among the trees,” “as . . . ​a shape of golden dew . . . ​Dances i’ the wind where ea­gle never flew.”79 During its advance, the light hands the shade of Rousseau a “chrystal glass / Mantling with bright Nepenthe.”80 When Rousseau drinks, his memory is erased instantly. It should be noted that the “shape all light” is itself a trope of erasure. It not only blots out the phenomena that it touches but also deconstructs the figure of simile: when it moves, “all that was seemed as if it had been not.”81 Unlike The Mask’s Shape, which appears to the ­people as a break from the pro­cession of tyranny—or perhaps as an event that, according to Alain Badiou, retroactively confers a new truth on a distinct historical occurrence—­the “shape all light” is a perpetually mutable formation that moves, “­silent as a ghost,” alongside the revolutionary agent, leading him to yet another spectacle.82 Rousseau sees the chariot again, but it is filled “with savage ­music,” leading on “the loud million.”83 This time the multitude, “as if from some dread war / Triumphantly returning,” drags along “a moving arch of victory”—­the monument of revolutionary triumph now reconfigured as an engine of imperialist expansion—­and then appears as atomies, floating together as parts of a single biomechanical war machine.84 Through this sequence, the poem seems to stage the extreme dynamism of the idea of modern po­liti­cal pro­gress—­entailed by reform, revolution, or even reactionism—­t hat has been tied, through images or rhetorical devices, to the concept of the automatic, or perpetually moving, apparatus. When we chain ourselves to ­t hese vehicles of repre­sen­ta­tion, Shelley seems to argue, we must consent to the dialectical inversions that they might produce in their continuous, wheeling movement. In d ­ oing so, we are caught in an inescapable dialectic of modernity: the representatives of po­liti­cal pro­gress always risk forgetting the conditions for which they once advocated and replicating the ones against which they originally stood.

Sh el l ey a n d th e Pr ehistory of th e Postliber a l

153

However, another way to read the poem is as a vision of extreme stasis—­a prophecy of a f­ uture when citizens merely act as if pro­gress has continued unabated but when the repre­sen­ta­tional mechanism has ceased to function, making any a­ ctual change futile. For instance, the lyric abounds with anaesthetized persons that participate in the “ghastly dance” of po­liti­cal history but who are, in effect, hollow, “shadows of shadows, yet unlike themselves.”85 Beyond the classic deconstructive message offered by Shelley’s hollow figures, this emptying of signification conveys the futility of offering one’s “second self”—­one’s bios, or civic identity—to a system of repre­sen­ta­tion. In his seminal biography of the poet, Earl Wasserman notes that Shelley’s poetry regularly featured such a “second self,” conveyed oftentimes as a shadow or other phantom, who participates in the metaphysical world.86 In The Triumph, however, that second self is extrapolated to an entire municipal crowd that has been denuded of in­de­pen­dence: ­people walking on the “public way . . . ​ [hasten] onward, yet none seemed to know / Whither he went, or whence he came, or why / He made one of the multitude.”87 Compelled to join the pro­cession, the crowd is swept up in the chariot’s track, but it has no say in its direction. Even the blindfolded driver cannot tell where the car w ­ ill go. ­Here, Shelley’s extended conceit on the moving vehicle of state conveys its nonintentionality, a system of rule whose automatic pro­cesses exist beyond the consent of the governed but also beyond variation. Indeed, when Rousseau—­who is one of the original members of this procession—­exits the sky-­pageant, he encounters the same pa­norama that the poet speaker sees in the first half of the poem. Even ­t hose who depart from the chariot’s track are still compelled to look at the pageant hovering above them: when Rousseau is asked by the speaker in the penultimate lines of the poem to describe the essence of life a­ fter he has escaped, he “cast[s] / His eye upon the car which now had rolled / Onward, as if that look must be the last.”88 The lyric’s ability to dramatize the exclusion of subjects from a po­liti­cal machine of modernity that is both perpetual and unchanging intuits the postliberal. This governing order is realized in an even more distant f­ uture, when citizens are systematically shed from a conveyance of pro­gress that no longer needs their repre­ sen­ta­t ion to function but that also appears to endlessly, and futilely, recycle the same socioeconomic doxa. However, by concentrating on the constituents of this new contraption—­and not on the lumbering, unstoppable Leviathan central to its original manifestations—­The Triumph revises the aesthetics of the oppressive state machine featured in the Romantic era, as well as Carl Schmitt’s pivotal twentieth-­ century idea of the state of exception, whereby the executive maintains power by removing himself from the institutions intrinsic to bourgeois liberalism.89 In Shelley’s lyric, t­hese institutions are not superseded but, instead, have been transformed into sheer spectacle. Th ­ ose who stand outside of institutions exist in a state of exclusion. They are stripped of repre­sen­ta­tion but are nevertheless compelled to authorize this singular vision of modernity.90 Shelley’s state of exclusion also seems to reconsider a major f­ actor in previous repre­sen­ta­t ions of the po­l iti­cal machine: the vari­ous forces—­such as the divine

154

Ja mison K antor

right of kings, the cunning of reason, or the mass l­abor necessary for industrial development—­binding the populace to the executive and driving them all forward. The lyric suggests that the compulsion to validate the new automaton of state—­ and to stare mutely at its continual turning—­now comes from media spectacle, a phenomenon nearly literalized by the poem’s pro­cession of shadows, light, and grotesque pageantry. (­Here, Shelley revisits Marat’s key observation that, in modernity, public reason w ­ ill be replaced by airy publicity.)91 Among the many critics who have discussed the politics of spectacle in The Triumph, Joel Faflak comes closest to this analy­sis, stating that the lyric “predicts a history fascinated by the production of images that body forth life, but then compromise any return to life itself, a way to make the Empire live on, despite, or ­because of, its failure.”92 Connected to the compulsive expansion of capital into ever more ghostly shapes and abstractions, this government by spectacle, Faflak might say, responds to a population that has become endlessly addicted to the next hit of affect or scandalous pleasure—­a fantasy that disseminates from an executive who is, in actuality, unable to steer history in any definitive direction.93 However, if t­ here are highs, then t­ here are also comedowns. Citizens are made equally exhausted and cynical by this pro­cession of signifiers and stare blankly, like the shade of Rousseau, at the masque(s) recurring before them. William Words­worth described this phenomenon as the “savage torpor” produced by the emerging mass media of the 1790s, whose constant sensationalism blunted one’s ability to rank or assess value.94 A generation l­ater, Shelley’s lyric would amplify Words­worth’s remark and apply it to the condition of the polis: subjects find themselves suspended, unable to discern profound events from insignificant ones, and—­much like the unanswered final question of the poem—­waiting for an event that remains outside the prospect of the existing order of meaning. In 1824, The Triumph of Life appeared for the first time as a se­lection in Shelley’s Posthumous Poems. Describing Percy’s most memorable qualities in the preface to the volume, Mary Shelley reports that her husband was “a bright vision, whose radiant track, left ­behind in the memory, is worth all the realities that society can afford.”95 Her reflections recall the predominant image of his final lyric: the char­i­ot­eer streaking across a sky followed by a nebulous pageant. They also act as a tribute to the ubiquitous Platonism that animated Shelley’s poetry. Beyond ­these qualities, however, Mary Shelley’s observation registers the same deconstruction that characterizes her husband’s lyr­ics. For it is at once a commemoration and a warning: while poetry offers us access to the “bright vision” that exists beyond the veil of the material world, it also mimics the fabulation for which that world might be easily traded.

IV So what is life? More specifically, what w ­ ill life resemble a­ fter the ascension of a postliberal machine of politics? I want to reference the critical heritage of The Triumph of Life—­which has elevated the poem as one of the major works of speculative lit­er­a­ture

Sh el l ey a n d th e Pr ehistory of th e Postliber a l

155

in the Romantic period—­and close by outlining three potential f­utures implied by the lyric: a return to a wholly aestheticized politics, a retreat from politics entirely and its replacement with insular groups that offer their own Leitkultur, and a utopian renewal of the concept of the po­liti­cal machine, one that entails a commitment to repre­sen­ta­tion and affirms the emancipatory qualities that attend it. The Triumph is a highly aesthetic per­for­mance. With its polychromatic texture, it invokes an amazing expanse of media history, from the sacred image to the written word to the cinema.96 It is also, however, a meditation on the influences and inadequacies of aestheticism for living. Indeed, recent studies of the poem have tended to engage directly this dialectic between artistic absorption and skepticism: The Triumph is both a perfect example of the aesthetic ideology endemic to the greater Romantic lyric and—as it preempts critique from Hegel, Adorno, and De Man—­a savvy commentary on the critical powers and limits of art; it is an excursus that happens to masquerade as art itself.97 Th ­ ere is a third option, however, and it seems to capture the repre­sen­ta­tion of subjects in the poem who attend compulsively—­and wearily—to the pageant of civic life that passes before them, making “Circles around it like the clouds that swim / Round the high moon in a bright sea of air / And more did follow, with exulting hymn.”98 The lyric can be read as proposing a f­ uture when, given the complete detachment of subjects from governing institutions, the aesthetic may be the only pos­si­ble choice left for mass engagement. (One must also note the simultaneous possibility ­here that, ­under late capitalism, this kind of art ­will be subsumed into the logic of the market completely. Shelley’s poem also contains this augury: troubled by the continued proliferation of paper money and “the ghost of gold,” the poet fills The Triumph with a series of translucent figurations that mimic the intangibility of abstract capital.)99 Not only would civics be replaced by frivolous media, but private citizens might become its greatest producers. By creating a dynamic simulacrum that stands in for degraded or non­ex­is­tent institutions, ­t hese endeavors would be part of what Adam Curtis has dubbed “hypernormalisation”: the fabrication of a simplistic, functioning po­liti­cal order that obscures the chaotic real­ity lurking beneath.100 In the current moment, it is right-­w ing internet provocateurs—or trolls—­who seem to be most at home with the hypernormal, as they recycle po­liti­cal memes and screeds whose absurdist quality allows t­ hese texts to slip between irony and a kind of hyperbolic sincerity.101 While the hyperreal texture, satiric quality, and glorious pageantry of The Triumph might appeal to postliberal internet reactionaries, its abstract qualities and the disinterested gaze of its poet-­speaker gesture to the rise of a class of leftist bohemians—­perhaps like the original Shelley-­Byron cohort—­ who champion art b ­ ecause of its in­de­pen­dence from hegemony, as well as its ability to expose, but not rectify, systemic absurdities. Commenting on the hipster enclaves emerging in urban centers, one economist (who never fails to naturalize capital) has said that a new, precarious bohemianism ­w ill be one of the outcomes of our ac­cep­tance of dangerous economic in­equality.102 The second f­uture entailed by the poem involves another retreat from the modern structure of liberal repre­sen­ta­tion. But this timeline does not feature an

156

Ja mison K antor

attempt by citizens to reconstitute a lost public sphere through aesthetics. Instead, the lyric suggests an age marked by the endless deferral of any totalizing po­liti­cal order, an adjournment that Shelley’s readers have seen in the conditional tone of his po­liti­cal verse and in the poet’s commitment to the idea of messianic time.103 One par­tic­u­lar strength of The Triumph is its ability to illustrate this kind of temporal suspension: the blind char­i­ot­eer of history does not move in any conclusive direction but instead follows arbitrarily the tracks of a hovering sun, a guide star that, paradoxically, announces the end of history, illuminating “all that is, has been, or ­will be done.”104 In the book How W ­ ill Capitalism End? (2016), the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck dubs this suspended f­ uture a “lasting interregnum.” Streeck argues that, following the breakdown of the bourgeois liberal consensus, the next epoch would be “a prolonged period of social entropy.”105 ­Here, atomized groups and epistemologies would emerge to fill the vacuum left by a discredited order that nevertheless has fomented no serious counterorder. (In the lyric, the common ­people—­hollowed into the form of shadows and suspended in the air—­cannot join the train following the char­i­ot­eer but “wheel . . . ​Round them and round each other, and fulfill / Their work,” withdrawing into their everyday pursuits.)106 The result is a replacement of “structure”—or the collective institutions that had previously made up vari­ous po­liti­cal machines—­w ith “culture,” where fragmented pockets of the population reformulate themselves through “fuzzy” custom, norms, or even ethnicity.107 The stuff that binds together the disparate h ­ uman shapes in The Triumph is usually described as “life,” a Platonic ideal that Shelley once named the “spirit within [man] at enmity with nothingness and dissolution.”108 While Shelleyan life has been cast as a vitalist force that resists oppressive social categories—­heteronormativity, the hyperspectacle of late capital—­one can also understand it, like The Triumph’s chariot, as a substance frozen in time, avoiding any confrontation in f­avor of its own l­ imited activity.109 In fact, this phenomenon may be vis­i­ble in the practices of the con­temporary acad­emy, which, in large part due to its subjugation to a regime of metrics and utilitarian outcomes, has produced a kind of quietist materialism, where politics—or even a basic social urgency—­are explic­itly removed from empirical scholarship or scholarship about empiricism. This situation also recalls the poet’s belief in, to reference Robert Mitchell’s recent analy­sis of Shelleyan vitalism, suspended animation, where the “non-­action” of the mind in the face of socio-­ materialist upheaval inspires a variety of passive re­sis­tance, a cornerstone of liberal politics.110 But how long must knowledge workers remain suspended? Oftentimes, the result has been an evolutionary theory without subjects, an Anthropocene without capitalism, and a new scientism that sometimes evades politics as a ­matter of duty.111 However, The Triumph does not just forecast the end of po­liti­cal praxis in modern life—or its withering on the vine of an effete liberalism. The lyric also hints at an even more distant ­f uture when the structure of politics has long since been re-­ formed around the multitude. Furthermore, Shelley intimates that the operation

Sh el l ey a n d th e Pr ehistory of th e Postliber a l

157

of that structure ­w ill become so autonomous—so automatic—­t hat the subjects it serves can, for the most part, forget that it exists.112 At first, this utopian prediction seems unlikely. The lyric is bleak on precisely this issue; it is almost defined by its refusal to place images, tropes, and persons within a coherent repre­sen­ta­ tional schema, w ­ hether that schema is po­liti­cal, rhetorical, or both. And yet, within a central tableau of The Triumph, icons that had previously signified exclusion reverse themselves temporarily and offer a picture of unification. When the ghost of Rousseau has his own dream vision, he awakes to see a “common Sun” that “Sheds [light] on the common earth,” a bid for the expansion of enlightenment beyond the bound­aries of private control. Given Shelley’s fascination with natu­ral energy, perhaps the line is also a prophecy of communal solar power, spreading across the earth for all to use. The light from that sun burns “on the w ­ aters of a well that glowed / Like gold,” an image that upends Shelley’s pervasive fear of fictitious finance by converting m ­ atter that is merely “like gold” into a public resource. It illuminates “the orient cavern” in which Rousseau finds himself, a repre­sen­ta­ tion that revises Shelley’s e­ arlier allusion to Bacon and a scientific method guided by personal acquisition—­where “lightning . . . ​wake and unbar the caves” of ignorance that hold “The trea­sure of the secrets of its reign”—­into a kaleidoscopic “blaze” with many paths, a method of knowledge creation that has been unbound from a single po­liti­cal economic regime. And Rousseau’s vision is not guided by  Reason—­which can be instrumentalized—­but Love, a force that defies transfiguration.113 All t­ hese structural changes—­t he expanded commons, the democ­ratization of raw materials and the productive apparatus, the development of knowledge proj­ ects liberated from socioeconomic hegemony, the society bonded together by care—­have been proposed t­ oday.114 All of them would require vigorous public effort to achieve. Ironically, we would know that this ­future has arrived, the lyric implies, when the structures on which it had been built take root within the depths of consciousness, in dreams that occur within dreams. To witness the triumph of this new po­liti­cal machine would be to see that triumph not as an arch of victory laid on the backs of the p ­ eople but as a diaphanous beam of light that is both t­ here and not t­ here, as external guide and internal conviction—­and ­under whose “obscure tenour” we are all covered.115

notes 1.  As evidence of this claim, I note the 2015 film adaptation of The Big Short, which, at the time, featured no less than three of Hollywood’s most notable leading men: Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, and Christian Bale. For the original book, see Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York: Norton, 2011). 2. Lewis, The Big Short, 70, 73, 151. 3.  Bethany McClean and Joseph Nocera, All the Dev­ils Are ­Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2011), 122, 358. 4.  William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.335, OpenSource Shakespeare, accessed July 2019, https://­w ww​.o ­ pensourceshakespeare​.­org​/v­ iews​/­plays​/­play​_­v iew​.­php​?W ­ orkID​=t­ empest&Act​ =­1&Scene​=­2&Scope​= ­scene.

158

Ja mison K antor

5.  For the intersection between mass print and the paper money that underwrote high finance, see Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth-­and Nineteenth-­Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 153–169. For the spectral quality of finance, see Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 141–169; Alex Dick, Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Lit­er­a­ture, and Economic Debate in Britain, 1790–1830 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 123–149. The connection of fate with financial speculation is discussed in Christian Thorne, “Providence in the Early Novel, or Accident If You Please,” MLQ 64, no. 3 (2003): 323–347; and Jamison Kantor, “Horace Walpole and the Fate of Finance,” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 58, no. 2 (2017): 135–155. 6.  A long intellectual history of mechanism in po­l iti­c al theory can be found in Giuseppa Saccaro-­Battisti, “Changing Meta­phors of Po­liti­cal Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 44, no. 1 (1983): 31–54. 7.  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, rev ed. (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2011), 1–2; Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. G.D.H. Cole (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1923), 18. 8.  “Sailing of Bonaparte,” The Morning Post (London), August 7, 1815. 9.  Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 535. 10.  William Hazlitt, “Review of Shelley’s Posthumous Poems,” in Shelley: The Critical Heritage, ed. James E. Barcus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 341. 11.  Paul De Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Continuum, 2004), 37. 12.  Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 159. See also Orrin N. C. Wang, Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Wang reckons with Shelley’s The Triumph of Life via De Man’s “Shelley Disfigured,” an essay that, according to Wang, illuminates the poem’s portrayal of “a violently linguistic world in which the only action is the arbitrarily positing ‘madness of words’ ” (Fantastic Modernity, 46). 13.  For the view of Shelley as an “agrarian reactionary”—­who wanted to preserve the vestiges of benevolent aristocracy—­see Donald Reiman, “Shelley as Agrarian Reactionary,” in Reiman and Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 589–599. Jerrold Hogle sees a poem such as The Mask of Anarchy as a bid to restore the true liberty associated with “ ‘Constitutional’ government,” not a call to overcome that hegemonic system. Hogle, Shelley’s Pro­cess: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 138. Fi­nally, for a definitive account of Shelley’s pre-­Marxist radicalism, see Paul Foot, Red Shelley (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980). 14.  Jeremy Bentham, Plan of Parliamentary Reform (London: R. Hunter, 1817), 52. 15.  Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 70. 16.  Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). As Jameson said in 1991, “the return to history everywhere remarked t­ oday demands closer scrutiny in the light of this ‘historical’ perspective—­only it is not a return exactly, seeming rather to mean incorporating the ‘raw material’ of history and leaving its function out, a kind of flattening and appropriation” (325). 17. Jameson’s Representing Capital: A Commentary on Volume One (London: Verso, 2011) is, in the author’s own words, “a book about unemployment” (2). “Being unemployed or without economic function is no longer to be expelled from capital,” as Jameson says, “but to remain within it. Where every­t hing has been subsumed ­under capitalism, t­ here is no longer anything outside it; and the unemployed . . . ​are as it ­were employed by capital to be unemployed; they fulfill an economic function by way of their very non-­functioning” (71). Jameson’s comment applies to low unemployment environments, too: con­temporary cap­i­tal­ist economies w ­ ill sometimes tame inflation by inducing recessions, thus driving up unemployment. 18.  See Terry Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (New York: Norton, 2014), 134–141. For a fulsome treatment of the term “po­liti­cal

Sh el l ey a n d th e Pr ehistory of th e Postliber a l

159

machine,” see Adam T. Smith, The Po­liti­cal Machine: Assembling Sovereignty in the Bronze Age Caucasus (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015), 7–11, 27–58. 19.  Robert C. Kennedy, “Probe Away,” HarpWeek, accessed June 2019, https://­w ww​.­harpweek​ .­com​/0 ­ 9Cartoon​/B ­ rowseByDateCartoon​.­asp​?­Month​=­March&Date​=1­ 8. 20.  Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (London: J. S. Jordan, 1791), 161. 21.  Marat quoted in Michel Vovelle, The Fall of the French Monarchy, 1787–1792 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 209. 22. Marat quoted in ibid. Contrast Marat’s claims about the importance of mass media with theorists of the Atlantic Republican tradition, who find a relationship between rationality and artifice in the composition of po­liti­cal modernity. Michel Foucault, for instance, discusses the interdependence of the state—­which “is governed according to rational princi­ples that are intrinsic to it”—­with the art of government, which “find[s] the princi­ples of its rationality in . . . ​ the specific real­ity of the state.” Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–84, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: New Press, 2000), 213. 23.  William Hazlitt, “Review of Biographia Literaria,” Edinburgh Review 28 (1817): 505. 24. Bentham, Plan of Parliamentary Reform, 52. 25.  Ibid., 229. 26.  Ibid., 195. 27.  G.W.F. Hegel, “The Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism,” in The Early Po­liti­cal Writings of the German Romantics, ed. and trans. Frederick C. Baiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 4. 28.  G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 170. 29.  See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1990), 27. 30.  Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Eigh­teenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Collected Works, vol. 11 (New York: International Publishers, 1979), 186. 31. Bentham, Plan of Parliamentary Reform, 229. 32.  In his study on the cultural impact of the nineteenth-­century railroad, Michael Freeman reports that the British Parliament “legislated the first public railways into existence,” but, in the interest of efficiency and punctuality, allowed them to remain a de facto private mono­ poly. See Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 28. 33.  Marx and Engels, The Eigh­teenth Brumaire, 186. 34.  Ibid., 106. 35.  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, in Reiman and Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 267, 256. 36.  Percy Bysshe Shelley to Henry Reveley, November 17, 1819, in The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 2, Shelley in Italy, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 158. For Ivan Ortiz, “poetic making is intimately linked to the figure of transport in Shelley’s work,” while “the steamboat (in par­tic­u ­lar) might be said to have represented not only a new kind of poetic figuration, which proj­ects an inner ideal out into the world, but also the practical application of poetry for social and po­liti­cal reform.” Ortiz, “Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Modern Transport” (PhD diss., Prince­ton University, 2013), 119, 158. 37.  Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Letter to Maria Gisborne,” in Reiman and Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 332. 38.  Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy, in Reiman and Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 320. 39.  Ibid., 319, 325. 40.  Ibid., 315. 41.  Ibid., 317, 320, 326. 42.  Ibid., 318. 43.  For a good overview of the civic pageantry of the early modern masque, see Michael Witmore, “Arrow, Acrobat and Phoenix: On Sense and Motion in En­glish Civic Pageantry,”

160

Ja mison K antor

in The Automaton in En­glish Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Wendy Beth Hyman (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 109–127. 44.  Vari­ous critics have discussed the importance of the antimasque to Shelley’s lyric art. See Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 1975), 190–191; Stephen Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 201; Andrew Stauffer, Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15. 45.  Amanda Jo Goldstein, Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 167. 46.  Ibid., 168; Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhe­toric of Con­temporary Criticism (London: Routledge, 2005), 199. 47.  Shelley, “The Mask of Anarchy,” 319, 320. Goldstein sees the aestheticism of the Shape as a blatant imposition of rhetorical machinery. She describes its sudden appearance as a “figura-­ ex-­machina moment in which a flagrantly poetic ‘Shape’ handily finishes off the task of po­liti­cal strug­gle” (Sweet Science, 167). Kir Kuiken, on the other hand, sees the Shape as the possibility of figuration itself and, hence, a sign of openness and hope for radical demo­cratic reform. See Kuiken, ­Imagined Sovereignties: T ­ oward a New Po­liti­cal Romanticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 196. 48. Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy, 319. 49.  Ibid., 326. 50.  For the social and aesthetic meaning of the Liverpool-­Manchester Railway—on its opening day in September 1830—­see Paul Fyfe, “On the Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, 1830,” BRANCH: Britain, Repre­sen­ta­tion and Nineteenth-­Century History, December 2012, http://­www​.­branchcollective​.o ­ rg​/­​?p ­ s​_a­ rticles​=­paul​-­fyfe​-o ­ n​-­the​-­opening​-­of​-­the​ -­liverpool​-­a nd​-­manchester​-­railway​-­1830. 51. Ibid. 52. Stauffer, Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism, 15. 53. Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy, 316–317. 54.  Ibid., 317. 55.  Ibid., 318. 56.  Ibid., 317. 57.  Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (Notes ­towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85–126. 58. Hogle, Shelley’s Pro­cess, 323. 59. Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy, 325, 320. 60. See Foucault, “Governmentality,” 211–219; Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 51–73. 61. Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy, 327, 329. 62.  Ibid., 323. 63.  Ibid., 326. 64. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 101. 65.  Leigh Hunt, “Disturbances at Manchester,” The Examiner (London), August 22, 1819, 530. 66.  Labour Party, For the Many, Not the Few: The L ­ abour Party Manifesto 2017, October 2017, 11, https://­labour​.o ­ rg​.­u k​/w ­ p​-­content​/u ­ ploads​/­2017​/­10​/l­ abour​-­manifesto​-­2017​.­pdf. 67.  William Hone, The Right Divine of Kings to Govern Wrong! (London: William Hone, 1821). Hone and the cartoonist George Cruikshank had condemned the Peterloo Massacre two years ­earlier, collaborating on a brutal doggerel satire called The Po­liti­cal House That Jack Built (1819). See William Hone, The Po­liti­cal House That Jack Built, Romantic Circles: Editions, 1998, https://­romantic​-c­ ircles​.­org​/­editions​/­hone​/­jacktext​.­htm. 68. Hone, The Right Divine of Kings, 26. 69.  Scholars have linked the prince regent—­who ascended to the throne in 1821—to Frank Churchill, Jane Austen’s self-­obsessed dandy in Emma (which was, of course, dedicated to

Sh el l ey a n d th e Pr ehistory of th e Postliber a l

161

the prince). See, for instance, Jocelyn Harris, Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017), 189. 70.  For Shelley’s aversion to calculative rationality, see Robert Kaufman, “Legislators of the Post-­Everything World: Shelley’s ‘Defence’ of Adorno,” ELH 63, no. 3 (1996): 714–725. For the limitless horizon of po­liti­c al change, see Matthew Borushko, “Aesthetics of Nonviolence: Shelley, Adorno, Rancière,” in The Politics of Shelley: History, Theory, Form, Romantic Circles: Praxis Series, October 2015, https://­w ww​.­rc​.­umd​.e­ du​/­praxis​/s­ helley​_­politics​/­praxis​ .­2015​.­shelley​_­politics​.­borushko​.­html. This entire volume from Romantic Circles is worth consulting for links between Shelley and Adorno. 71.  William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1966), 160. 72.  Ibid., 161. 73.  Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Triumph of Life, in Reiman and Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 484. 74.  Ibid., 487. 75.  Ibid. London’s population reached one million in 1800. Given Shelley’s interest in Malthus’s theory of population and nourishment, he may have been aware of this figure. 76.  Ibid., 494, 500. 77.  On the conservatism following 1815, see Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and Its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 5–6; Kevin Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 78. Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy, 317; Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 494. 79.  Ibid., 494–495. 80.  Ibid., 494. 81.  Ibid., 495. 82.  Ibid., 494, 497; Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2007), 173–261. 83. Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 497. 84.  Ibid. For a keen analy­sis of the ideological and architectural meanings of this monument, see Wang, Fantastic Modernity, 60–65. 85. Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 500, 498. 86.  Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 9. 87. Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 484–485. 88.  Ibid., 500. 89.  Carl Schmitt, Po­liti­cal Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5–35. 90.  Wang, on the other hand, sees the spectacle of ­those institutions as disputing the permanence of any po­liti­cal legitimacy: “As a simulacrum, the discourse of the triumph becomes the perfect emblem of the French Revolution, as an event with no real truth or legitimacy ­behind the guises it steals from other centuries” (Fantastic Modernity, 60). 91.  Marat quoted in Vovelle, The Fall of the French Monarchy, 209. 92.  Joel Faflak, “Right to Romanticism,” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 27, no. 3 (2016): 290. 93.  Ibid., 287–289. 94.  William Words­worth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 746. 95.  Mary Shelley, preface to Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824), iv. 96.  For the cinematic ancestors of Shelley’s simulacra in The Triumph, see Faflak, “Right to Romanticism,” 289–293. 97.  According to Rajan, The Triumph stages one of Hegel’s major categories of art—­the symbolic—by presenting a parade of ideas that resist stable material receptacles. See Tilottama Rajan, “The Work of the Negative: Symbolic, Gothic, and Romantic in Shelley and Hegel,” Studies in Romanticism 52, no. 1 (2013): 21–28. For Shelley’s indirect influence on

162

Ja mison K antor

Adorno, aesthetic ideology, and the “ ‘critical nature’ of [the] modern aura,” see Robert Kaufman, “The Work of Romanticism in the Age of Mechanical Postmodernism,” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 12, no. 2 (2001): 239. 98. Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 497. 99.  The “ghost of gold”—or the proliferating abstraction of capital—is Dick’s formulation, and he takes the term from Shelley’s Mask (321). See Dick, Romanticism and the Gold Standard, 110–149. 100.  Adam Curtis, dir., Hypernormalisation (London: BBC, BBC iPlayer, 2016). 101.  Redfield is very lucid on the dangers of Shelley’s aestheticized politics, as well as the poet’s deconstruction of the liberal order, an approach that could very well result in a f­ uture open to reactionaries, not radicals. See Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics, 148–171. 102.  The economist is Tyler Cowen. See his interview on Morning Edition: “Tired of In­equality? One Economist Says It’ll Only Get Worse: Interview with Tyler Cowen,” NPR, S­ eptember 12, 2013, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/221425582. 103.  James Chandler, for instance, argues for this form of historical time in The Mask of Anarchy, especially as the poem competed with print journalism to register the events that ­were unfolding: “[The poem] displaces the everyday time of the periodicals into a quasi-­ apocalyptic framework, anticipating the displacement of ‘empty homogenous time’ by ‘messianic time’ in Benjamin’s twentieth-­century analy­sis.” Chandler, ­England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 529. Concentrating on the conditional word “may,” Susan Wolfson addresses Shelley’s equivocations over politics in a classic reading of the sonnet “­England in 1819.” Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 202–206. 104. Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 486. 105.  Wolfgang Streeck, How ­Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System (London: Verso, 2016), 13. 106. Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 488. 107. Streeck, How ­Will Capitalism End?, 37–46. 108.  Percy Bysshe Shelley, “On Life,” in Reiman and Fraistat, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 506. 109.  For Faflak, Shelleyan “life” registers the spectacle of capital whose payout is infinitely deferred—­“a production of distinct images whose unfolding spectacle postpones distinction in­def­initely”—­and the traumatic kernel that resides within that fantasy. Joel Faflak, “Dancing in the Dark with Shelley,” in Constellations of a Con­temporary Romanticism, ed. Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 151. Lee Edelman takes Shelleyan “life” to have a “constitutive negativity” that offers an opening for subjects to reject reproduction—­and the sexual categories influencing it—­altogether. Edelman, “The Pathology of the ­Future, or the Endless Triumphs of Life,” in Khalip and Pyle, Constellations of a Con­ temporary Romanticism, 35. For the vitalist interpretation of Shelleyan “life” and its universalism, see Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), esp. 2–3, 175–180. Ross Wilson posits a “post-­organic animism” in Shelley’s poetry that relates the per­for­mance of poetry to the production of life and sees The Triumph of Life as restaging the familiar “opposition between life and theory.” Wilson, Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 6, 145. For the vitalist concept of suspension in Shelley’s poetry and social thought, see Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Lit­er­a­ture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 43–73. 110.  In Mitchell’s impressive analy­sis, Shelley’s formal and philosophical conception of suspension registers “a holding-­against that served as the basis for the subsequent development of par­tic­u ­lar forms of willing” (Experimental Life, 63). 111.  In an attempt to more accurately account for being within a climate that can no longer abide extraction, Jason Moore has coined the term “capitalocene,” which describes the pervasive influence of one economic model on humanity’s interaction with nature. See Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecol­ogy and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015), 169–192. In a now infamous essay, Jonathan Kramnick dismantles many of the assumptions b ­ ehind evolutionary criticism. Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry

Sh el l ey a n d th e Pr ehistory of th e Postliber a l

163

37, no. 2 (2011): 315–347. Goldstein pushes against the trend to denude science studies of any po­l iti­c al content in her new book on Romantic materialism (Sweet Science, throughout). 112.  Mitchell approaches Shelley’s conception of the automatic movement of nature/politics in a slightly dif­fer­ent way than I do. He contends that the suspension of the movements of the natural/social world inspired by vitalism could be an antidote to the involuntary habits and reactions driven by the hyperanimated modern-­media environment that was emerging in Shelley’s day (Experimental Life, 61–62). According to Mitchell, such a suspension revises Shelley’s original po­liti­cal affinity for a dynamic, “progressive materialism” of ceaseless change (62). I argue, however, that Shelley never abandons this progressive materialism—or, by extension, his belief in the mutability of social conditions—­but, instead, recognizes that such a movement must be relegated, occasionally, to a background condition of life. Of course, it should be noted that one’s ability to avoid constant po­liti­cal strug­gle—to place strug­gle in the background occasionally—is an argument typically made of representative democracy. In this way, my “automatic radical” Shelley and Mitchell’s “passive liberal” Shelley are not that dif­fer­ent ­a fter all. 113. Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 494, 492, 498. 114.  As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write, the very structure of ­labor ­today makes it harder to hide the phenomenon of a shared, common endeavor: “Cap­i­tal­ist abstraction always rests on the common and cannot survive without it,” while, “in the age of biopo­liti­cal production, the common, which previously was cast as external, is becoming completely ‘internalized.’ ” Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 159, 283. In Ecosocialism, the sociologist Michael Löwy notes that “solar energy, which has never aroused much interest in cap­i­tal­ist socie­ties, . . . ​must become the object of intensive research and development and play a key role in the building of an alternative energy system.” Löwy, Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Cap­i­tal­ist Catastrophe (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), 23; and see esp. 1–17. The progressive policy analyst Matt Bruenig posits that demo­cratized investment vehicles such as social wealth funds could provide ­people with a stable income and act as a transition vehicle ­toward the communal owner­ship of production. Bruenig, “Nickel-­a nd-­Dime Socialism,” Medium, February 2017, https://­medium​.c­ om​ /­@MattBruenig ​/­nickel​-­a nd​-­d ime​-­socialism​-­47fcec406295. In an essential chapter from We Have Never Been Modern, “Constitution,” Bruno Latour reveals the po­liti­c al stakes of an “in­de­pen­dent” scientific method in the confrontation between Hobbes and Robert Boyle. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 13–48, esp. 20–21. Fi­nally, Nancy Fraser’s recent work has been dedicated to advancing the idea of an economy in which care and emotional ­labor are equivalent to— or supersede—­production and ser­v ice. Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-­Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013), esp. 102–122. 115. Shelley, The Triumph of Life, 496.

Afterword on the uses of the history of technology for literary studies and vice versa Joseph Drury

The best interdisciplinary scholarship offers something of value to scholars on both sides of the disciplinary divide that it seeks to bridge. My contribution to this collection is to try to use the preceding essays in this volume to draw some general observations about what literary historians and historians of technology can learn from each other when they align their objects of study. What is distinctive about the practice of reading lit­er­a­ture through and in relation to the history of technology? What do the archives and methods of the history of technology reveal about literary texts and literary history that other approaches do not? And conversely, what can lit­er­a­ture and the kinds of textual analy­sis practiced by literary scholars in this volume contribute to the history of technology that other sources and methods cannot? The opportunity to reflect on ­t hese questions is rarer than one might think. Thanks in part to the encouragement of academic socie­ties and their flagship journals, scholars of lit­er­a­ture and science have regularly paused to map their field and reflect on emerging prob­lems and methods.1 But the field of lit­er­a­ture and technology lacks t­ hese institutional supports, and its scholars as a result tend to stay focused on particulars. ­Those who do this kind of work—if they think of themselves as belonging to such a field at all—­are left hoping to find their concerns addressed in passing in essays about lit­er­a­ture and science. But while the making of scientific knowledge almost always requires some kind of technology, technologies do not always involve science or scientists. Technologies are ways of d ­ oing t­ hings, not just ways of knowing. As such, they extend deep into the rhythms of everyday life in a way that is less often the case with scientific knowledge. The key questions and methodological prob­lems raised by reading lit­er­a­ture in relation to the history of technology are therefore distinct from—­and need to be theorized in­de­pen­dently from—­t hose raised by studying it in relation to the history of science. Let me start by addressing the first pair of questions—­t he ones about the value of the history of technology for literary studies—­since they are the ones with which 164

A fterwor d

165

my own work has been most concerned.2 The most impor­tant general observation suggested by ­t hese essays, to my mind, is that the history of technology offers literary scholars valuable new resources and an expanded vocabulary for thinking about the instrumental dimensions of literary forms—­that is, the uses and effects of dif­fer­ent genres, techniques, styles, and the like, and the vari­ous means by which literary texts mediate the subjectivity and be­hav­ior of authors and readers. One way of thinking about the history of literary studies is as a series of interdisciplinary experiments in the ontology of the literary object. In turning to the interpretive methods and resources of other disciplines, literary scholars have repeatedly—­ and productively—­made the text resemble the objects of study in t­ hose disciplines. Critics who studied Derrida viewed the text as an unstable semiotic system; ­those influenced by Freud or Lacan saw it as a kind of dream-­work or neurotic symptom; scholars who drew on Marx and Foucault uncovered ideology and technologies of power; and so on. That is not to say that t­ here has ever been a purely literary approach to a literary text; even methods presented as such—­New Criticism or  structural narratology, for example—in fact made use of other disciplines (­psy­chol­ogy, linguistics, anthropology) to insist on the autonomy of the literary object.3 One might even say that all literary scholarship is to some extent interdisciplinary; work that appears not to be so is merely drawing on other disciplines unconsciously or in ways that have become so naturalized to literary study as to be imperceptible. It makes sense, then, that in turning to the history of technology, several essays in this collection should treat the literary object—­whether a genre, text, or formal device—as a kind of technology, a means by which some end is achieved. Laura Francis argues that John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi uses the baroque theater as a laboratory or experimental “instrument” for testing the epistemic limits of con­temporary optical technologies and natu­ral philosophy. In Thomas Oldham’s reading of the Scriblerian farce Three Hours a­ fter Marriage, he notes how the potentially emancipatory implications of the play’s parody of the virginity-­test scene from another Jacobean tragedy, Thomas Middleton and W ­ illiam Rowley’s The Changeling, are undermined by the specular economies of theatrical repre­sen­ta­tion, which, like the supposedly enlightened gynecological treatise to which Oldham compares it, functions as an “instrument” for turning ­women’s bodies into objects of male consumption and control. Likewise, Jamison Kantor explores Percy Shelley’s fascination with the technological marvels of the early nineteenth c­ entury, observing that the “mechanical regularity” of the verbal refrains that Shelley inserted into his protest poem The Mask of Anarchy makes them resemble “mnemonic devices” that “automate thought for readers,” while his use of allegory to lend meaning to contingent historical events operates as “an engine that regiments the pieces and narrative of public affairs.” In ­these essays, the exploration of a text’s intersections with the history of technology produces a special attentiveness to the dif­fer­ent functions of vari­ous literary techniques, formal devices, and modes of repre­sen­ta­tion. A par­tic­u ­lar advantage of studying the entanglements of lit­er­a­ture and technology in the period covered by this volume is that the nature and extent

166

J o s e p h D ru r y

of the affinities between them was the subject of extensive l­egal debate. In limiting the property rights of authors to a period of fourteen years, the legislators responsible for the 1710 Statute of Anne, which has been called “the world’s first copyright statute,” drew on the system of patent law that had long protected technological innovations.4 As a result, one of the key issues in the half ­century of ­legal debates prompted by the statute was how, if at all, literary inventions differed from mechanical ones. In an opinion written for Donaldson v. Becket, the 1774 House of Lords ruling that settled the debate decisively in f­ avor of statutory limits by equating literary with technological innovation, Baron James Eyre claimed that literary works and mechanical inventions ­were both forms of intellectual ­labor that involved the ordering of dif­fer­ent parts into a ­whole in order to achieve some purpose: “In a mechanic invention the Corporeation of Parts, the Junction of Powers, tend to produce some one End. A literary Composition is an Assemblage of Ideas so judiciously arranged, as to enforce some one Truth, lay open some one Discovery, or exhibit some one Species of ­mental Improvement. A mechanic Invention, and a literary Composition, exactly agree in Point of Similarity.”5 As Zachary Mann argues in his contribution to this collection, taking such claims seriously requires incorporating the history of technology into literary history in a way that “reconceptualizes eighteenth-­century knowledge production in industrial terms.” The relations between author, text, and reader in the Enlightenment period come to seem analogous to t­hose between “philosopher-­ inventors,” machines, and their users. Creativity, composition, thinking itself all begin to be defined through a dualistic, hierarchical opposition to forms of intellectual ­labor—­imitation, quotation, compilation, indexing—­long thought to belong to a  broad continuum of humanistic literary practices but now deemed merely “mechanical,” alienated, even “subhuman.” The most impor­tant sign of an author’s genius becomes the capacity for “invention” and the arrangement of ideas conceived in Lockean terms as discrete units, while the value of a literary object—­ whether a form, a genre, or individual text—­consists in its utility to the reader. This reconceptualization of literary ­labor might seem reductive, but as this collection makes clear, t­ here is in fact a g­ reat deal to be said about the uses of literary objects. Indeed, sustained attention to the uses of lit­er­a­ture ­ought to be especially welcome now, given recent complaints about the impoverished state of con­ temporary critical discourse on the ways that readers engage with texts. Joshua Landy, for example, bemoans his students’ narrow preoccupation with the “propositional content” of works of fiction, which he blames on a generation of En­glish professors and teachers who have “systematically—­albeit unwittingly—­engaged on a long-­term campaign of misinformation, relentlessly persuading would-be readers that fictions are designed to give them useful advice.”6 All but forgotten, he thinks, are the many other designs that fictions have always had on us, such as strengthening our capacity for empathy or moral action, enhancing our knowledge of the world, or refining our ability to give shape and meaning to life experience. Rita Felski has echoed t­ hese concerns in her recent work, noting that “the current canon of theory yields a paucity of rationales for attending to literary

A fterwor d

167

objects,” though she attributes this predicament to the dominance of two opposing but equally misguided critical practices: a “theological” approach that insists on the alterity, ineffability, and thus “impotence” of literary works and an “ideological” one that whittles the notion of a text’s use down “to the bare bones of po­liti­ cal and ideological function.” As a solution, Felski turns to the phenomenological tradition to call for renewed engagement with what she terms the “worldly aspects of lit­er­a­ture”—­that is, the variety and complexity of its real-­world uses and effects. Such an engagement need not entail neglect of its aesthetic qualities, she argues; on the contrary, “to propose that the meaning of lit­er­a­ture lies in its use is to open up for investigation a vast terrain of practices, expectations, emotions, hopes, dreams, and interpretations.”7 Some notable recent attempts to explore this terrain have hinted at a key role for science and technology studies. Felski herself has called for new “postcritical” methods of reading that eschew the hermeneutics of suspicion in f­avor of an approach informed by Bruno Latour’s actor-­network theory. Instead of assuming a position of detachment from the text, the postcritical reader presumes the “coimplication and entanglement of text and critic”; and rather than treating texts as inert objects of analy­sis incapable of transcending the historical context in which they w ­ ere composed, the postcritical reader treats them the way Latour treats “nonhuman actors” in a network—­not as “passive intermediaries” but as “active mediators,” “coactors that make ­t hings happen” across time and space.8 Yet, despite making a power­f ul case for actor-­network theory as a resource for literary scholars, Felski ignores the importance of science and technology studies to its origins and practice and as a result fails to recognize its potential value to the postcritical proj­ect for which she advocates. Latour himself recalls that he developed actor-­ network theory due to his dissatisfaction with the so-­called Strong Programme within the sociology of scientific knowledge, which took the then-­fashionable position that the “hard facts of science” w ­ ere socially constructed all the way down. The method that he and his collaborators developed as an alternative transformed not just the sociology of knowledge but social science as a w ­ hole by insisting that nothing is merely socially constructed and that all h ­ uman activities involve networked entanglements of the social and the material, subjects, and objects. This origin story—or “ felix culpa,” as he calls it—­explains why Latour thinks that one of the best ways for social scientists to make vis­i­ble the agency of nonhuman actors remains ethnographic studies of technology. In “the artisan’s workshop, the engineer’s design department,” or “the scientist’s laboratory,” he argues, objects “live a clearly multiple and complex life,” observable not just in the vari­ous “meetings, plans, sketches, regulations, and t­ rials” that lead to the establishment of the network in which they are an actor—­and a­ fter which they dis­appear from view—­but also in their interaction with existing social agencies.9 Some recent reflections on literary form have suggested that the study of technology might prove as valuable a resource for exploring the agency of literary objects as it has been for other nonhuman actors. For Henry Turner, Latour’s understanding of form as the “princi­ple of translation” responsible for forging

168

J o s e p h D ru r y

associations in a network offers literary scholars a way to move beyond criticism’s “reductive” preoccupation with what forms mean or represent ­toward a new focus on their function: “form does t­ hings, it ­doesn’t simply mean t­ hings,” he insists. But reimagining literary forms along t­ hese lines, he argues, w ­ ill require critics to break with some long-­standing habits: “one of the most pressing tasks confronting literary criticism t­ oday ­will be to expand concepts of form beyond linguistic and textual models” to include “all meaningful artifacts, of what­ever type—­written texts, yes, but also physical specimens, instruments readings, photo­graphs, models of all kinds,” since all of ­these objects “possess at least a minimal structural complexity and use signifying ele­ments in ways that are conventional and thus formalized.”10 Taking up this challenge, Caroline Levine has drawn on actor-­network theory to explore the way forms connect “­things, ­people, and ideas to each other,” introducing the concept of “affordance” from design theory to think through “the par­tic­u­lar constraints and possibilities that dif­fer­ent forms afford.” Just as a material such as glass affords “transparency and brittleness,” for example, and a ­simple device such as a doorknob affords “turning, pushing, and pulling,” so a literary form such as rhyme affords “repetition, anticipation, and memorization” and “the triple-­decker novel affords elaborate pro­cesses of character development in multiplot social contexts.”11 Levine ultimately turns out to be more interested in social than technical systems, but her basic proposition that design theory offers a framework for thinking about the agency of forms in general is a suggestive one for anyone interested in the intersections of lit­er­a­ture and technology. This volume explores some of the ways that scholars might use the history of technology to think about the agency of literary objects. For ­those seeking to understand the agency of nonhuman actors in general, Latour argues, the next best ­thing to studying technologies as they are being created is to bring them back into view “using archives, documents, memoirs, museum collections, ­etc., to artificially produce, through historians’ accounts, the state of crisis in which machines, devices, and implements w ­ ere born.”12 If design theory provides a theoretical framework for the symmetrical analy­sis of literary and material forms, the history of technology extends that framework to include the ­human and nonhuman actors common to the dif­fer­ent networks in which they operate. Thus, Emily West proposes that the tangled provenance, composition, and social function of the gothic lantern that Horace Walpole installed above the staircase at Strawberry Hill makes it an ideal interpretive framework for examining the design of The ­Castle of Otranto (1764), whose depiction of perverse genealogical lines is structured by the same “aesthetics of queer time” that the lantern materializes. Meanwhile, Kevin MacDonnell finds in the serpentine line traced by the linkage in James Watt’s steam engine as it mediates the divergent motions of the piston and beam the same Hogarthian “princi­ples of design” that inspired the si­mul­ta­neously progressive and digressive narrative machinery of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. To be sure, such explorations of  the shared cultural contexts shaping a technology and a literary form are not entirely new to eighteenth-­century scholarship. John Bender pioneered this kind of work in the 1980s with his classic study of the overlapping discursive practices and

A fterwor d

169

procedures of the emerging penitentiary system and the realist novel.13 But in Bender’s work, as in other New Historicist studies, form is understood to determine function. The assumption is that ­because the novel works like a prison, it must always have the same disciplinary function as one. Formal similarities may sometimes indicate functional ones; indeed, it certainly makes sense that the atmospheric effects and ideological subversions accomplished by Walpole’s gothic lantern should be replicated in his gothic fiction. But one of the key insights of modern science and technology studies reflected in ­these essays is that the function of a technical artifact depends on the par­tic­u­lar circumstances of its use. To assume other­wise, argues the phi­los­o­pher Andrew Feenberg, is to be guilty of a kind of fetishism: “like price, function is a relational term which we attribute to the object as a real quality.” In real­ity, however, “the function of any technology is relative to the organ­izations that create and control it and assign it a purpose.”14 Thus, although both Watt’s linkage and Sterne’s narrative, according to MacDonnell, “negotiate the systematizing nature of design with the elastic quality of empirical real­ity,” they do so to very dif­ fer­ent ends. Unlike Watt’s steam engine, which revolutionized industrial production and, as MacDonnell notes, helped launch the Anthropocene, Sterne’s narrative is an “antimachine” that undertakes a similar form of mediation but for the purposes of “Enlightenment self-­critique.” In both t­ hese essays, the history of technology is deployed not, as one might expect, to assimilate t­hese fictions’ notorious formal eccentricities to normative Enlightenment productive and reproductive systems but to explore the aesthetic princi­ples and cultural contexts informing their re­sis­tance to them. But what of the final question I began with, the one about what lit­er­a­ture and literary analy­sis has to offer the history of technology? The reflection on the uses of literary objects in t­ hese essays ­ought to be as valuable to historians of technology as it is to literary historians. Urging historians of science to pay attention to recent debates in literary studies, Henry Turner argues that “literary critics and historians of science alike should be undertaking an analy­sis of the many networks of forms that constitute our objects of inquiry and that allow any mode of communication, thought, or collective association to take place.”15 Historians of technology have just as much to gain, since literary forms play an equally critical role in the invention and evolution of technologies. Although Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer w ­ ere primarily concerned with providing an account of the origins of the scientific method, the attention they paid to the “literary technology” of the experimental narrative in Leviathan and the Air-­Pump also revealed a good deal about the textual forms that helped establish the epistemological authority—­a nd thus utility and influence—of modern scientific instruments.16 Recent literary studies of the balloon craze of the 1780s suggest that the analy­sis of literary forms can yield similar dividends in areas that are more traditionally of interest to historians of technology. John Robbins, for example, has noted that Elizabeth Inchbald’s im­mensely popu­lar 1784 farce The Mogul Tale, about a group of En­glish balloonists who are blown off course and end up in the harem of an Indian prince, appeared before any manned ballooned flights had taken place in Britain. The play thus

170

J o s e p h D ru r y

functioned as “a kind of ballooning demonstration in its own right,” one of a number of theatrical per­for­mances in the period that sought to turn the theater into a “tool for shaping opinions about the new technology of ballooning, and technology in general, to the En­glish public at large.”17 This volume features other examples of literary forms that ­were used to influence public opinion about technological innovation, from the revenge tragedy that John Webster turned into a means of scrutinizing the truth-­making powers of the new philosophy and its technologies to the didactic “popu­lar tale” that Maria Edgeworth a­ dopted to “neutralize the disruptive potential” of the optical telegraph at the turn of the nineteenth c­ entury. In my own work, I have also pointed to the power of the “it-­narrative” to shape attitudes to disruptive new transportation technologies such as the post-­ chaise, which helped double the speed at which passengers could travel when it was first introduced to Britain in the 1750s.18 Historians of technology ­will not need to be reminded of the central role that public opinion plays in sustaining the networks involved in the creation and use of new technologies or that successful technological innovation requires much more than the solitary ­labor of heroic inventors. In the United States, one need only think of the chilling effect that the Challenger disaster had on space exploration or the influence of climate-­change denialism on the stalled transition to electric and hybrid vehicles to recognize the constitutive role public attitudes and imaginaries continue to play in technological development. The “cultural turn” taken by the history of technology over the past two de­cades points to other ways that historians of technology might make use of the kind of literary scholarship found in this volume. As Carroll Pursell has observed, ­today’s historians of technology no longer confine themselves to causal explanations of how and why certain technologies came to be in­ven­ted, nor are the questions they ask of a tool or machine l­ imited to ones about where it comes from, how it works, or what it does. Influenced by cultural studies, they now seek to interpret technologies, viewing a machine as “both a cultural practice and cultural production” about which one might also ask, “what does it mean?”19 The cross-­disciplinary ­origins of American studies have meant that U.S. literary history, starting with Leo Marx’s seminal The Machine in the Garden, has been a particularly fruitful field for work on the cultural meanings of technologies.20 But even half a glance at the book lists of the major academic publishers ­w ill show that the past two de­cades have seen a growing number of cultural histories of technology written by scholars of British lit­er­a­ture.21 Literary scholars in ­these studies use their expertise in textual analy­sis to generate arguments about the shifting cultural meanings of technologies such as the windmill and the mechanical clock, the railway and the radio, the automobile and the internet. Several essays in this volume illustrate the advantages of this approach. Thinking about the meaning of a technology requires looking beyond the circumstances of its invention to its use. To support the argument that the French optical telegraph came “to stand for more than the device itself” in British culture, becoming in the course of the 1790s a potent symbol of French military power and the threat of Jacobinism, Deven Parker focuses not on its inventor, Claude Chappe, though

A fterwor d

171

his nationality is obviously relevant, but on media reports and images of its real and potential uses. In British newspaper accounts, she observes, the French military’s use of the telegraph to transmit news of victories back to the government in Paris ­were conflated with the victories themselves, thereby suggesting “a causal link” between the two, while James Gillray’s eerie image of Charles James Fox as a ­human telegraph lighting the invading French fleet’s way to London figures the device as an “extension” of the revolutionary French government that was threatening “to infiltrate Britain both physically and ideologically.” Indeed, Parker implies that arguments about the priority of a par­tic­u­lar invention—­a staple of traditional history of technology—­are of interest not ­because they explain anything about the evolution of a technology but for what they reveal about its cultural meaning at the time such arguments are made. The “historical revisionism” motivating the flood of publications claiming to prove that the British had in­ven­ted the telegraph first merely betrays national anx­i­eties about the undeniable superiority of the French when it came to making use of it. Parker’s analy­sis also shows that the shift in focus from innovation to use that cultural history requires, while a worthy historiographic enterprise in its own right, can also make for better, more robust causal explanations of a technology’s evolution: “invention and innovation rarely lead to use,” the historian David Edgerton observes, “but use often leads to invention and innovation.”22 As Parker makes clear, the vari­ous British inventors of optical telegraphs had much less of an impact on the development of a telegraph system in Britain than did the terrifying media reports of its successful use by the French. Attending to the uses and meanings of technologies rather than innovations also makes it pos­si­ble to create space for a wider range of experiences and voices. When told in terms of innovation and production, the history of technology typically becomes “a story of the deeds of g­ reat men.”23 Cultural histories and use-­ centered accounts, on the other hand, “shift attention from the new to the old, the big to the small, the spectacular to the mundane, the masculine to the feminine, the rich to the poor.”24 The novelist Maria Edgeworth moves into the center of a narrative once dominated by her ­father, the inventor and Lunar Society member Richard Lovell Edgeworth. The hinge receives as much attention as Watt’s steam engine, the colonial or “creole” appropriations of a technology as much as its design and construction at the imperial center. Just as importantly, such an approach also makes it pos­si­ble to consider technologies that ­were valuable and meaningful not ­because of their novelty but b ­ ecause of their association with the past or b ­ ecause of their disruption of the kind of teleological narratives characteristic of histories of technological innovation. As Emily West notes in her chapter in this collection, the material composition of Walpole’s gothic lantern “revises the way that technological objects w ­ ere called on across the eigh­teenth ­century to manifest Enlightenment modernity as a progression from the superseded past.” Such objects remind us not to conflate the history of technology with the history of innovation and that, as Edgerton observes, “technologies do not only appear, they also dis­ appear and reappear, and mix and match across the centuries.”25

172

J o s e p h D ru r y

Of course, the uses to which technologies are put in the imaginative works that literary scholars typically focus on are fictional, sometimes even fantastical, which means the evidence they provide is of a distinctive kind. In his classic essay “Time, Work-­Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” E. P. Thompson used the detailed descriptions of agricultural l­ abor in the georgic poetry of the working-­class poets Stephen Duck and Mary Collier as evidence of the way new clock-­regulated work regimens began to change p ­ eople’s experience of time in the eigh­teenth ­century. But when he alluded to the famous opening scene from Tristram Shandy, it was not of course to suggest that any real ­people might have used clocks to regulate their sexual activity the way Walter Shandy does. Jokes are evidence not of realities but of attitudes, or what Raymond Williams would ­later call the “structures of feeling” of a par­tic­u ­lar historical moment. The opening scene of Tristram Shandy, like several other episodes in Sterne’s novel, comments trenchantly on the “intimate levels” of h ­ uman experience clocks and watches w ­ ere beginning to reach by 26 the mid-­eighteenth ­century. It is precisely this insight into the “subjective experience” of a machine or device, however, that Rosalind Williams argues is missing from much history of technology, which even in its most methodologically sophisticated forms typically focuses on the design, construction, and operation of objects. Although social constructionist studies of technology bring users, consumers, and maintainers into the foreground, they are more interested in “be­hav­ior, especially aggregate be­hav­ior,” than subjective experience, she notes, while actor-­network theory prides itself on “putting conscious and non-­conscious agents on the same level.” Fictions such as Tristram Shandy, on the other hand—­Williams’s examples are Robert Louis Stevenson’s South Pacific narratives—­demonstrate “the value of imaginative lit­er­a­ture both as a rec­ord of, and even more as a source of insight into, historical experience.” Although t­ here are other ways that historians can access the phenomenological dimensions of a technology, Williams argues that lit­er­a­ture is an especially useful resource b ­ ecause it “approaches the world si­mul­ta­neously as externally experienced—­a field out ­t here—­a nd as internally experienced—­inward feelings, passions and thoughts.”27 In this volume, therefore, Erik Johnson uses readings of fiction by Daniel Defoe and Mary Hearne to challenge common assumptions about the effect of new mechanical devices on the experience of time in the eigh­teenth ­century. Rather than illustrating how clocks and watches enabled individuals to order their experience by allowing them to map their ideas in time and space, as Locke had suggested, the disruptions and short-­circuits in the detailed “temporal accountings” of Robinson Crusoe on his island and Hearne’s beleaguered heroine reveal the “fragility” of attempts to impose this kind of order, betraying “a deep suspicion of the modern, technologically mediated experience of time.” One final way that this volume asks historians to think about lit­er­a­ture is as an archive for studying the ­imagined uses of technologies. Edgeworth’s “Lame Jervas” is a rec­ord not of the way the optical telegraph was actually used—­Parker looks to newspapers for that—­but of the uses that w ­ ere i­magined for it during the period when interest in its development was at its height. Tippoo Sultan’s exultant response

A fterwor d

173

to Jervas’s demonstration of his system articulates British fears about the dangers of the telegraph falling into the hands of foreign despots and British fantasies of technological and cultural supremacy. The virginity test that Dr. Fossile gives his bride in Three Hours a­ fter Marriage is ludicrous, but its i­magined uselessness, as Oldham demonstrates in his essay, reflects real changes in medical science brought about by the introduction of the forceps. Indeed, as Simone Müller and Heidi Tworek have recently argued, the fictional uses of a technology have often proved as impor­tant for understanding its historical meaning and development as the ­actual ones: “­imagined uses s­ haped cultural narratives about technology as harbingers of modernity, as agents of universal peace, or, in the case of distorted man-­ machine relationships, as the end of mankind,” often structuring the po­liti­cal framing of research and use in ways that influence “the physical development of technologies.” As an example, they point to the impact of science fiction by Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein on cryonics, the practice of freezing the dead for f­ uture reanimation. But one could point to ­earlier instances from the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries. If we are to believe The Clockmakers Outcry against the Author of the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760)—­though unlike E. P. Thompson, I suspect we are not—­t he use that Walter Shandy made of his ­house clock had a material effect on the trade of En­glish clockmakers in the months following the publication of the work’s first two volumes. Literary repre­sen­ta­tions of the Aeolian harp had a particularly direct and palpable impact on its popularity in the second half of the eigh­teenth c­ entury. The Scottish musician and publisher James Oswald is said to have been inspired to design the instrument in the 1740s ­after reading a description of ­music being produced by the wind in Homer, while sales of the instrument from his shop in London w ­ ere given an early boost by its appearance in literary works by fellow Scots, The ­Castle of Indolence (1748) by the poet James Thomson and Tobias Smollett’s picaresque novel The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753). But Müller and Tworek point to two other advantages of incorporating i­magined uses into the history of technology. First, extending the concept of use to include fictional or poetic repre­sen­ta­tions allows historians to broaden the social groups involved in technological innovation and appropriation by including ­those who may never have had any contact with a technology but ­were nonetheless powerfully affected by it. As an example, they point to the effect of the electrical telegraph on the imagination of the Victorian public: ­people who could not afford to send a tele­gram nonetheless read news sent by it and w ­ ere inspired to imagine its global social effects: “without necessarily ever physically using the technology, t­ hese actors still ­shaped the financial, po­liti­cal, or marketing regimes that provided the structural conditions of technological development.” Second, attending to ­i magined uses makes space for histories of “­imagined ­futures”; ­whether or not literary visions of technological ­futures become a real­ity, they have “fundamentally s­ haped the pre­sent” by affecting how innovators thought and planned.28 The real Tipu Sultan did not use an optical telegraph, while Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s design was never implemented in ­England and only briefly in Ireland. But it is not hard to see how Maria Edgeworth’s account of

174

J o s e p h D ru r y

the use that Tipu might have made of it would have influenced the development of the optical telegraph systems that w ­ ere actually constructed in Britain and parts of the empire during the first few de­cades of the nineteenth ­century. Let me close with a final observation about the value of this kind of work ­today. In a recent essay on the potential “postdisciplinary liaisons” that might be forged between science studies and the humanities, Mario Biagioli notes that, unlike many other academic disciplines that emerged a­ fter World War II, science studies has not been threatened by the rise of cultural or postcolonial studies, or by the changes in U.S. immigration patterns that affected the study of Eu­ro­pean lit­er­a­ture and culture, or even by the shifts in funding and research priorities that followed the end of the Cold War. One explanation for this, he argues, is that science studies—­ including the study of technology—­has become ever more relevant to the world in which we live: “if around 1950 the popu­lar imaginary placed science close to the military and away from the home, t­ oday’s technoscience frames our everyday life at all levels, down to our notion of the self.”29 As I write this in the summer of 2020, the planet is in the grip of a pandemic that has caused, so far, the death of more than half a million ­people worldwide and the disability of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions more; it has destroyed livelihoods, put millions of p ­ eople out of work, shuttered shops, restaurants, offices, schools, universities, museums, galleries, libraries, cinemas, and theaters; it has changed the way p ­ eople work, travel, and socialize; the way we teach, learn, and study; the way we educate our c­ hildren and the way we vote; the way we fall in love and the way we die, mourn, and grieve. We spend our days reading and watching news reports about the latest vaccine trial or epidemiological study published in Nature or the Lancet. On social media, we practice armchair immunology and harangue each other about public-­health mea­ sures such as wearing face masks and social distancing. To make sense of all ­t hese changes, we have turned sometimes to the history of science, medicine, and technology, to stories about the invention of the smallpox vaccine, the 1918 flu pandemic, and the public infrastructure proj­ects launched in the nineteenth ­century to prevent cholera outbreaks. But we have also sought solace in works of fiction, from classics like Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus’s The Plague to con­temporary postapocalyptic novels by Colson Whitehead, Margaret Atwood, and Emily St. John Mandel—­material that does not merely help explain how we arrived in this situation or how previous generations w ­ ere able to escape similar ones but that also offers insight into the meaning of our experience by giving context and coherence to our daily feelings of fear, anger, or despair. In such a world, the cross-­disciplinary study of ­every aspect of the technologies that have ­shaped and continue to shape h ­ uman life on this planet seems more essential than ever.

notes 1.  For some recent examples, see the essays u ­ nder the heading “History of Science and Lit­ er­a­ture and Science: Convergences and Divergences” in the “Focus” section of the journal Isis 101, no. 3 (2010); Sabine Sielke, “Science Studies and Lit­er­a­ture,” Anglia 133, no. 1 (2015): 9–21; and the special issues of the Journal of Lit­er­a­ture and Science (10, no. 1, 2017) and Configurations (26, no. 3, 2018). For a recent survey of the field focusing on the long eigh­teenth c­ entury, see

A fterwor d

175

my own article, “Lit­er­a­ture and Science in Enlightenment Britain: New Directions,” Lit­er­a­ ture Compass 14, no. 6 (2017), https://­compass​.­onlinelibrary​.­wiley​.­com​/­doi​/­10​.­1111​/l­ ic3​.­12395. 2.  See Joseph Drury, Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 3.  On the influence of behaviorist psy­chol­ogy, for example, on early New Criticism, see Joshua Gang, “Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Close Reading,” ELH 78, no. 1 (2011): 1–25. For a good recent account of the importance of Saussurean linguistics and Claude Lévi-­ Strauss’s anthropology to structuralist narrative theory, see Kent Puckett, Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 205–214, 215–222. 4.  Mark Rose, Authors and O ­ wners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 5. 5.  Quoted in ibid., 88. 6.  Joshua Landy, How to Do Th ­ ings with Fictions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 3. 7.  Rita Felski, The Uses of Lit­er­a­ture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 2, 5, 7–8. 8.  Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 152, 164, 180. 9. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­ Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 94, 80. 10.  Henry S. Turner, “Lessons from Lit­er­a­ture for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflections on ‘Form,’ ” Isis 101, no. 3 (2010): 586, 582. For Latour’s reflections on the function of forms in networks and his definition of a form as “something which allows something ­else to be transported from one site to another,” see Latour, Reassembling the Social, 222–223. 11.  Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 2015), 153n22, 6. Felski also discusses the potential of this concept for literary studies in The Limits of Critique, 164–165. The term was coined by the psychologist James J. Gibson to explain the interaction of animals with their environment, but it was pop­ u­lar­ized by the cognitive scientist Don Norman in The Psy­chol­ogy of Everyday ­Things (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 12. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 81. 13.  See John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 14.  Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (London: Routledge, 1999), 117. 15.  Turner, “Lessons from Lit­er­a­ture,” 586. 16.  Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985), 25. 17. John Robbins, “Up in the Air: Balloonomania and Scientific Per­ for­ mance,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 48, no. 4 (2015): 531, 528. 18. Drury, Novel Machines, 125–126. 19.  Carroll W. Pursell, “Technologies as Cultural Practice and Production,” Technology and Culture 51, no. 3 (2010): 721, 716. 20.  Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in Amer­i­ca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). 21.  See, for example, Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1998); Pamela Thurschwell, Lit­er­a­ture, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth ­Century in Postmodern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Nicholas Daly, Lit­er­a­ture, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Re­nais­sance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London: Routledge, 2007); Jessica Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery, and Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Plea­sure, Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth ­Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian

176

J o s e p h D ru r y

Lit­er­a­ture and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Rajani Sudan, The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); Andrew Gaedtke, Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology, and Narrative Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Clare Brant, Balloon Madness: Flights of the Imagination, 1783–1786 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2017). 22.  David Edgerton, “From Innovation to Use: Ten Eclectic ­Theses on the Historiography of Technology,” History and Technology 16, no. 2 (1999): 121. 23.  Carroll Pursell, “Seeing the Invisible: New Perceptions in the History of Technology,” Icon 1 (1995): 11. 24.  David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (London: Penguin, 2019), xxiv. 25.  Ibid., xxii. 26.  E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-­Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Pre­sent 38 (1967): 63, 73, 57. Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift in Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in ­England and Wales, 1300–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) challenge many of Thompson’s conclusions, but they also use literary works as evidence, citing the poetry of William Langland and John Clare and engaging thoughtfully with the literary scholarship of Mikhail Bakhtin and Stuart Sherman, among ­others. For Raymond Williams’s most extended discussion of the concept of “structures of feeling,” see Marxism and Lit­er­a­ ture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–135. 27.  Rosalind Williams, “The Lantern-­Bearers of the History of Technology,” History and Technology 29, no. 3 (2013): 262, 271. 28.  Simone M. Müller and Heidi J. S. Tworek, “­Imagined Use as a Category of Analy­sis: New Approaches to the History of Technology,” History and Technology 32, no. 2 (2016): 106–108. 29.  Mario Biagioli, “Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 818.

Bibliography

Alker, Sharon. “Explosive Potential: Radicals and Chemistry in Maria Edgeworth’s Fiction.” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 22, no. 1 (2011): 1–18. Alkon, Paul K. Defoe and Fictional Time. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979. Allan, D.C.G. William Shipley, Founder of the Royal Society of Arts: A Biography with Documents. Corr. ed. London: Scolar Press, 1979. Allen, Robert C. “The Industrial Revolution in Miniature: The Spinning Jenny in Britain, France, and India.” Journal of Economic History 69, no. 4 (2009): 901–927. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. ­ rials, Amster, Mara. “Frances Howard and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling: T Tests, and the Legibility of the Virgin Body.” In The Single ­Woman in Medieval and Early Modern ­England: Her Life and Repre­sen­ta­tion, edited by Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler, 211–232. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Re­nais­sance Studies, 2003. Anderson, Susan. Echo and Meaning on Early Modern En­glish Stages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Arago, François. Historical Eloge of James Watt. Translated by James Patrick Muirhead. London: John Murray, 1839. Aristotele’s Master-­Piece. London, 1684. Armintor, Deborah Needleman. “The Sexual Politics of Microscopy in Brobdingnag.” SEL: Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1500–1900 47, no. 3 (2007): 619–640. Armstrong, Nancy. “The Other Side of Modern Individualism: Locke and Defoe.” In Individualism: The Cultural Logic of Modernity, edited by Zubin Meer, 111–119. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011. Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Carolyn  J.  B. Hammond. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library 26–27. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014–2016. Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. In Northanger Abbey and Other Stories, edited by James Kinsley, John Davie, and Claudia L. Johnson, 3–187. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Austin, J. L. How to Do ­Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Bacon, Francis. The New Organon. Translated and edited by Lisa Jardine and Michael ­Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

177

178 B i b l i o g r a p h y Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. New York: Continuum, 2007. Baine, Rodney M. “Roxana’s Georgian Setting.” SEL: Studies in En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, 1500–1900 15, no. 3 (1975): 459–471. Baines, Edward. History of the Cotton Manufacture in ­Great Britain. London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835. Baines, Paul, and Pat Rogers. Edmund Curll, Bookseller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Balizet, Ariane M. “ ‘Drowned in Blood’: Honor, Bloodline, and Domestic Ideology in The Duchess of Malfi and El Médico De Su Honra.” Comparative Lit­er­at­ ure Studies 49, no. 1 (2012): 23–49. Baridon, Michael. “Hogarth’s ‘Living Machines of Nature’ and the Theorisation of Aesthetics.” In Hogarth: Representing Nature’s Machines, edited by David Bindman, Frédéric Ogée, and Peter Wagner, 85–101. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. ­ omen, and Nurses. London, 1699. Barret, Robert. A Companion for Midwives, Child-­Bearing W Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Beck, Lewis White. “World Enough, and Time.” In Probability, Time, and Space in Eighteenth-­ Century Lit­er­a­ture, edited by Paula Backscheider, 113–139. New York: AMS Press, 1979. Behrendt, Stephen. Shelley and His Audiences. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Bellanca, Mary Ellen. “Science, Animal Sympathy, and Anna Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition.’ ” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 37, no. 1 (2003): 47–67. Bender, John. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-­ Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. Brooklyn. New York: Radical Thinkers, 2009. Bentham, Jeremy. Plan of Parliamentary Reform. London: R. Hunter, 1817. Berry, Ralph. The Art of John Webster. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. Biagioli, Mario. “Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 816–833. ­ ngland. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003. Bicks, Caroline. Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s E —­—­—. “Stones like ­Women’s Paps: Revising Gender in Jane Sharp’s Midwives Book.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (Fall–­Winter 2007): 1–27. Billing, Christian M. Masculinity, Corporality and the En­glish Stage, 1580–1635. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Black, Ian. “NSA Spying Scandal: What We Have Learned.” The Guardian, June 10, 2013. https://­w ww​.­t heguardian​.­com​/­world​/­2013​/­jun​/­10​/­nsa​-­spying​-­scandal​-­what​-­we​-­have​ -­learned. Blackstone, William. The Oxford Edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of ­England: Book II: Of the Rights of ­Things. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Blackwell, Bonnie. “The Pleasures of Geometry: Math and Melancholia in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Helóïse.” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 15, no. 1 (March 2004): 89–112. Blair, Ann. “Natu­ral Philosophy and the ‘New Science.’ ” In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, edited by Glyn P. Norton, 449–457. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Blair, Ann, and Peter Stallybrass. “Mediating Information, 1450–1800.” In This Is Enlightenment, edited by Clifford Siskin and William B. Warner, 139–163. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Blake, William. Milton. In The Complete Illuminated Books, 431–446. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000.

Bibliogr aph y

179

Blewett, David. “The Double Time-­Scheme of Roxana: Further Evidence.” Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture 13 (1984): 19–28. Boehrer, Bruce. “Alsemero’s Closet: Privacy and Interiority in The Changeling.” Journal of En­glish and Germanic Philology 96, no. 3 (July 1997): 349–368. Boers, Elroy, Mohammad H. Afzali, Nicola Newton, and Patricia Conrod. “Association of Screen Time and Depression in Adolescence.” JAMA Pediatrics 173, no. 9 (2019): 853–859. Bonneuil, Christophe. “The Geological Turn: Narratives of the Anthropocene.” In The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, edited by Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne, 17–31. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015. Borushko, Matthew. “Aesthetics of Nonviolence: Shelley, Adorno, Rancière.” In The Politics of Shelley: History, Theory, Form, Romantic Circles PRAXIS, October 2015. https://­romantic​ -­circles​.­org​/­praxis​/­shelley​_­politics​/­praxis​.­2015​.­shelley​_­politics​.­borushko​.­html. Bourne, John. A Treatise on the Steam Engine in Its Application to Mines, Mills, Steam Navigation, and Railways. London, 1846. Boyle, John. Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift. London: A. Millar, 1752. Reprint, edited by Joao Froes, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Brant, Clare. Balloon Madness: Flights of the Imagination, 1783–1786. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2017. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Knopf, 1984. Bruenig, Matt. “Nickel-­a nd-­Dime Socialism.” Medium, February  2017. https://­medium​ .­com​/­@MattBruenig​/­nickel​-­a nd​-­dime​-­socialism​-­47fcec406295. Buci-­Glucksmann, Christine. The Madness of Vision: On Baroque Aesthetics. Translated by Dorothy Z. Baker. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013. Bullard, Paddy, and James McLaverty. Introduction to Jonathan Swift and the Eigh­ teenth-­Century Book, edited by Paddy Bullard and James McLaverty, 1–28. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Bullard, Rebecca. “Politics, History, and the Robinson Crusoe Story.” In Cambridge Com­ pan­ion to “Robinson Crusoe,” edited by John Richetti, 84–96. Cambridge: C ­ ambridge University Press, 2018. Bunn, James. Wave Forms: A Natu­ral Syntax for Rhythmic Language. Stanford, CA: ­Stanford University Press, 2002. Burns, Russel. Communications: An International History of the Formative Years. London: Institute of Electrical Engineers, 2004. Burson, Jeffrey D., and Anton M. Matytsin. Introduction to The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason, edited by Jeffrey  D. Burson and Anton  M. Matytsin, 1–20. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. Butler, Judith. Gender Trou­ble. 10th anniversary ed. London: Taylor and Francis, 1999. Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: En­glish Lit­er­a­ture and Its Background, 1760–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Caldwell, Roy C. “Tristram Shandy, Bachelor Machine.” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 34, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 103–114. Calè, Luisa. “Extra-­Illustration and Ephemera: Altered Books and the Alternative Forms of the Fugitive Page.” Eighteenth-­Century Life 44, no. 2 (2020): 111–135. Campbell, Jill. “ ‘I Am No ­Giant’: Horace Walpole, Heterosexual Incest, and Love among Men.” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 39, no. 3 (1998): 238–260. Cardwell, D.S.L. “Science, Technology, and Industry.” In The Ferment of Knowledge: ­Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-­Century Science, edited by Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau, 449–484. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

180 B i b l i o g r a p h y Car­ter, Ian. Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity. Manchester: ­Manchester University Press, 2001. Casid, Jill  H. Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject. Minneapolis: ­University of Minnesota Press, 2014. ­Castle, Terry. “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Meta­phorics of Modern Reverie.” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (1988): 26–61. Cavendish, Margaret. Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. Edited by Eileen O’Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Chakravorty, Swapan. Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton. Oxford: ­Clarendon Press, 1996. Chamberlayne, Thomas. The Compleat Midvvife’s Practice Enlarged. [London,] 1659. Chandler, James. ­England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Chico, Tita. The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Cipolla, Carlo M. Clocks and Culture, 1300–1700. New York: Walker and Com­pany, 1967. Clayton, Jay. Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth C ­ entury in Postmodern Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Cody, Lisa Forman. “The Politics of Reproduction: From Midwives’ Alternative Public Sphere to the Public Spectacle of Man-­Midwifery.” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 32, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 477–495. Cohen, Adam Max. Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. —­—­—. Technology and the Early Modern Self. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Cohen, Ashley. “Wage Slavery, Oriental Despotism, and Global L ­ abor: Management in Maria Edgeworth’s Popu­lar Tales.” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 55, nos. 2–3 (2014): 193–215. Cohen, G. A. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2000. Congreve, William. The Works of William Congreve. Edited by D.  F. Mc­Ken­zie. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Conrad, Peter. Shandyism: The Character of Romantic Irony. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978. Cook, Harold  J. ­Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Cookson, Gillian. The Age of Machinery: Engineering the Industrial Revolution, 1770–1850. Suffolk, UK: Boydell, 2018. Coppola, Al. The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natu­ral Philosophy in Eighteenth-­Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Courier and Eve­ning Gazette (London). November 21, 1784. Issue 730. —­—­—. November 26, 1794. Issue 734. Cowper, William. The Anatomy of Humane Bodies. London, 1698. Coykendall, Abby. “Chance Enlightenments, Choice Superstitions: Walpole’s Historic Doubts and Enlightenment Historicism.” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 54, no. 1 (2013): 53–70. Crane, R. S. “The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the History of Ideas.” In Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600–1800, edited by J. A. Mazzeo, 231–253. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. Critical Review, January  1765. In Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage, edited by Peter Sabor, 68–69. New York: Routledge, 1995. Crooke, Helkiah. Mikrokosmographia. London, 1615. Crutzen, Paul, and Eugene Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene.’ ” IGBP Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18.

Bibliogr aph y

181

Culpeper, Nicholas. A Directory for Midwives. London, 1651. —­—­—. A Directory for Midwives. Rev. ed. London, 1716. Curran, Stuart. Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Press, 1975. Curtis, Adam, dir. Hypernormalisation. London: BBC, BBC iPlayer, 2016. Dackerman, Susan. Introduction to Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Eu­rope, edited by Susan Dackerman, 19–35. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2018. Dacome, Lucia. Malleable Anatomies: Models, Makers, and Material Culture in Eighteenth-­ Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. —­—­—. “­Women, Wax and Anatomy in the ‘­Century of ­Things.’ ” Re­nais­sance Studies 21, no. 4 (2007): 522–550. Daly, Nicholas. Lit­er­a­ture, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Davies, Jeremy. The Birth of the Anthropocene. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. Day, Robert Adams. Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction before Richardson. Ann Arbor: ­University of Michigan Press, 1966. “Defence of Coach-­Building, and a Few Words on Steam-­Carriages.” Mechanics Magazine 18 (1833): 209–210. Defoe, Daniel. The Fortunate Mistress; or, a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Ma­de­moi­selle de Beleau . . . ​Being the Person Known by the Name of the Lady Roxana, in the Time of King Charles II. 2 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell / Shakespeare Head Press, 1927. —­—­—. A Journal of the Plague Year. Edited by Paula R. Backscheider. New York: Norton, 1992. —­—­—. The Life & Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York. 3 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell / Shakespeare Head Press, 1927. —­—­—. A Review of the Affairs of France. Edited by John McVeagh. 9 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003. —­—­—. A Tour through the Whole Island of ­Great Britain. Edited by Pat Rod­gers. London: Penguin, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. De Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhe­toric of Con­temporary Criticism. London: Routledge, 2005. —­—­—. “Shelley Disfigured.” In Deconstruction and Criticism, edited by Harold Bloom, 32–61. New York: Continuum, 2004. Dennis, John. The Plays of John Dennis. Edited by J. W. Johnson. New York: Garland Publishing, 1980. Desaguliers, John Theo­philus. A Course of Experimental Philosophy. Vol. 1. London: W. Innys, 1745. Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy with Se­lections from the Objections and Replies. Translated by Michael Moriarty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Dibdin, Charles. A Collection of Songs, Selected from the Works of Mr. Dibdin. To Which Are Added, the Newest and Most Favourite American Patriotic Songs. Philadelphia: Printed by J. Bioren for H. & P. Price, and sold by J. Rice, Baltimore, 1799. Dick, Alex. Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Lit­er­a­ture, and Economic Debate in Britain, 1790–1830. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. di Marco, Corolini. The Flying Island, &c. Being a Key to Gulliver’s Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnag, and Japan. London: Edmund Curll, 1726.

182 B i b l i o g r a p h y Dinshaw, Carolyn. How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988. Douglas, Aileen. Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690–1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Dowd, Michelle M. “Delinquent Pedigrees: Revision, Lineage, and Spatial Rhe­toric in The Duchess of Malfi.” En­glish Literary Re­nais­sance 39, no. 3 (2009): 499–526. Doyle, Laura. Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Drury, Joseph. “Lit­er­a­ture and Science in Enlightenment Britain: New Directions.” Lit­er­ a­ture Compass 14, no.  6 (2017). https://­compass​.­onlinelibrary​.­wiley​.­com​/­doi​/­10​.­1111​/­lic3​ .­12395. —­—­—. Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Duffy, Enda. The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Plea­sure, Modernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Eavis, Anna, and Michael Peover. Horace Walpole’s Painted Glass at Strawberry Hill. London: British Society of Master Glass Paint­ers, 1995. Edelman, Lee. No ­Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. —­—­—. “The Pathology of the ­Future, or the Endless Triumphs of Life.” In Constellations of a Con­temporary Romanticism, edited by Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle, 34–42. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Edgerton, David. “From Innovation to Use: Ten Eclectic Th ­ eses on the Historiography of Technology.” History and Technology 16, no. 2 (1999): 111–136. —­—­—. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. London: Penguin, 2019. Edgeworth, Maria. Popu­lar Tales. London: Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church-­yard, by C. Mercier and Co., 1804. Edgeworth, Maria, and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Esq. London: Printed for R. Hunter, 1820. Edgeworth, Richard Lovell. “An Essay on the Art of Conveying Secret and Swift Intelligence.” Transactions of the Royal Irish Acad­emy 6 (1797): 95–139. —­—­—. A Letter to the Right Hon. The Earl of Charlemont, on the Tellograph, and on the Defence of Ireland. London: Printed for J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church Yard, 1797. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York: New Directions, 1966. Erwin, Timothy. “William Hogarth and the Aesthetics of Nationalism.” Huntington Library Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2001): 383–411. Etmullerus, Michael. Etmullerus Abridg’d. London, 1703. An Explanation of the Nature of Equation of Time, and Use of the Equation ­Table for Adjusting Clocks and Watches to the Motion of the Sun. London: F. Clay, 1731. Faflak, Joel. “Dancing in the Dark with Shelley.” In Constellations of a Con­temporary Romanticism, edited by Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle, 147–161. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. —­—­—. “Right to Romanticism.” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 27, no. 3 (2016): 285–300. Fairclough, Mary. “The Telegraph: Radical Transmission in the 1790s.” Eighteenth-­Century Life 37, no. 2 (2013): 26–52. Farquhar, George. The Works of George Farquhar. Edited by Shirley Strum Kenny. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

Bibliogr aph y

183

Farr, Jason. Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019. Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology. London: Routledge, 1999. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. —­—­—. The Uses of Lit­er­a­ture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Ferguson, Adam. An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1980. Fissell, Mary E. “Remaking the Maternal Body in ­England, 1680–1730.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 26, no. 1 (January 2017): 114–139. —­—­—. Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern ­England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Floyd-­Wilson, Mary. Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Foot, Paul. Red Shelley. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980. Forman, Paul. “The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology.” History and Technology 23, nos. 1–2 (2007): 1–152. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. Translated by Graham Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. —­—­—. The Order of the ­Things: An Archeology of the ­Human Sciences. Anonymous translation. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. —­—­—. Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–84. Translated Robert Hurley. New York: New Press, 2000. Fox, Christopher. “Introduction: How to Prepare a Noble Savage: The Spectacle of ­Human Science.” In Inventing ­Human Science: Eighteenth-­Century Domains, edited by Roy Porter Fox and Robert Wokler, 1–30. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Fraser, Nancy. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-­Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. London: Verso, 2013. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Freeman, Michael J. Railways and the Victorian Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Fuller, John. Introduction to John Gay: Dramatic Works, edited by John Fuller, 1–76. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Fyfe, Paul. “On the Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, 1830.” BRANCH: Britain, Repre­sen­ta­tion and Nineteenth-­Century History, December  2012. http://­w ww​ .­branchcollective​.­org ​/­​?­ps ​_ ­a rticles​= ­paul​-­f yfe​-­on​-­t he​-­opening​-­of​-­t he​-­l iverpool​-­a nd​ -­manchester​-­railway​-­1830. Gaedtke, Andrew. Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology, and Narrative Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Gal, Ofer, and Raz Chen-­Morris. Baroque Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Gang, Joshua. “Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Close Reading.” ELH 78, no. 1 (2011): 1–25. García Santo-­Tomás, Enrique. La musa refractada: Literatura y óptica en la España del Barroco. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2014. Gay, John. Three Hours a­ fter Marriage. 1717. In John Gay: Dramatic Works, edited by John Fuller, vol. 1, 207–263. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. The Gentleman’s Magazine 64 (November 1794). Ghosh, Amitav. The ­Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

184 B i b l i o g r a p h y Gibson, Thomas. The Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomized. London, 1682. Giedion, Siegfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Gilmartin, Kevin. Writing against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Girten, Kristin M. “Mingling with M ­ atter: Tactile Microscopy and the Philosophic Mind in Brobdingnag and Beyond.” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 54, no. 4 (2013): 497–520. Glennie, Paul, and Nigel Thrift. Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in ­England and Wales, 1300–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Glissant, Édouard. The Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Goldstein, Amanda Jo. Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Golway, Terry. Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics. New York: Norton, 2014. Graham, Harvey. Eternal Eve. London: William Heinemann Medical Books, 1950. Graves, R. B. “ ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ at the Globe and Blackfriars.” Re­nais­sance Drama, n.s., no. 9 (1978): 193–209. ­Great Britain. An Act for Providing a Public Reward for Such Person or Persons as S­ hall Discover the Longitude at Sea. London: John Baskett, assigns of Thomas Newcomb, and Henry Hills, 1714. Griffiths, Trevor, Philip A. Hunt, and Patrick K. O’Brien. “Inventive Activity in the British Textile Industry, 1700–1800.” Journal of Economic History 52, no. 4 (1992): 881–906. Gubar, Susan. “The Female Monster in Augustan Satire.” Signs 3, no. 2 (Winter 1977): 380–394. Guerrini, Anita. The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and ­Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Gwilliam, Tassie. “Female Fraud: Counterfeit Maidenheads in the Eigh­teenth ­Century.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 6, no. 4 (April 1996): 518–548. Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Haggerty, George. Horace Walpole’s Letters: Masculinity and Friendship in the Eigh­ teenth ­Century. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2011. Hahn, Barbara. Technology in the Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Hahn, Roger. “The Application of Science to Society: The Socie­ties of the Arts.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eigh­teenth ­Century 25 (1963): 829–836. Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Hankins, Thomas L., and Robert J. Silverman. Instruments and the Imagination. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1995. Haraway, Donna. “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth C ­ entury.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and ­Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Harkness, Deborah. “ ‘Strange’ Ideas and ‘En­glish’ Knowledge: Natu­ral Science Exchange in Elizabethan London.” In Merchants & Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Eu­rope, edited by Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, 137–162. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Bibliogr aph y

185

Harlizius-­K luck, Ellen. “Weaving as Binary Art and the Algebra of Patterns.” TEXTILE 15, no. 2 (2017): 176–197. Harol, Corinne. Enlightened Virginity in Eighteenth-­Century Lit­er­a­ture. New York: Macmillan, 2006. Harris, Anne F. “Glazing and Glossing: Stained Glass as Literary Interpretation.” Journal of Glass Studies 56 (2014): 303–316. Harris, Jocelyn. Satire, Celebrity, and Politics in Jane Austen. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017. Harvey, Karen. “The ­Century of Sex? Gender, Bodies, and Sexuality in the Long Eigh­ teenth ­Century.” The Historical Journal 45, no. 4 (December 2002): 899–916. Hawley, Judith. “Tristram Shandy, Learned Wit, and Enlightenment Knowledge.” In The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, edited by Thomas Keymer, 34–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Lit­er­a­ture, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Hazlitt, William. “Review of Biographia Literaria.” Edinburgh Review 28 (1817): 488–515. —­—­—. “Review of Shelley’s Posthumous Poems.” In Shelley: The Critical Heritage, edited by James E. Barcus, 335–345. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. [Hearne, Mary]. The Female Deserters: A Novel. London: J. Roberts, 1718–1719. —­—­—. The Lover’s Week; or, The Six Days Adventures of Philander and Amaryllis. London: E. Curll and R. Francklin, 1718. Hegel, G.W.F. The Early Po­liti­cal Writings of the German Romantics. Edited and translated by Frederick C. Baiser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. —­—­—. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, edited and translated by William Lovitt, 3–35. New York: Garland Publishing, 1977. Heise, Ursula K. “Lost Dogs, Last Birds, and Listed Species: Cultures of Extinction.” Configurations 18, nos. 1–2 (Winter 2010): 49–72. Henderson, Andrea. “Death on the Stage, Death of the Stage: The Antitheatricality of The Duchess of Malfi.” Theatre Journal 42, no. 2 (1990): 194–207. Hershinow, Stephanie Insley. “The Incest Plot: Marriage, Closure, and the Novel’s Endogamy.” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 61, no. 2 (2020): 149–164. Hilaire-­Pérez, Liliane, and Catherine Verna. “Dissemination of Technical Knowledge in the ­Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era.” Technology and Culture 47 (July  2006): 536–565. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. —­—­—. Leviathan. Rev. ed. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2011. Hogarth, William. The Analy­sis of Beauty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Hogle, Jerrold. Shelley’s Pro­cess: Radical Transference and the Development of His Major Works. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Home, Henry, Lord Kames. The Ele­ments of Criticism. 6th ed. Edited by Peter Jones. 2 vols. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005. Hone, William. The Po­liti­cal House That Jack Built. Romantic Circles: Editions, 1998. https://­romantic​-­circles​.­org​/­editions​/­hone​/j­ acktext​.h ­ tm. —­—­—. The Right Divine of Kings to Govern Wrong! London: William Hone, 1821. Hooke, Robert. Micrographia; or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses. London: Martyn and Allestree, 1665.

186 B i b l i o g r a p h y Howse, Derek. Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press, 1980. Hughes, John. The Spectator, no. 220 (November 12, 1711). Edited by Richard Steele. In The Spectator, vol. 3, edited by George A. Aitken, 246–248. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898. Hunt, Leigh. “Disturbances at Manchester.” The Examiner, August 22, 1819. Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. London, 1726. Hyman, Wendy Beth. “ ‘Deductions from Meta­phors’: Figurative Truth, Poetical Language, and Early Modern Science.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Lit­er­a­ture and Science, edited by Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble, 27–48. London: Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2017. Ingold, Tim. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge, 2007. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming ­Human: ­Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press, 2020. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. —­—­—. Representing Capital: A Commentary on Volume One. London: Verso, 2011. —­—­—. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Pre­sent. London: Verso, 2013. Jardine, Lisa, and Michael Silverthorne. Introduction to The New Organon, by Francis Bacon, vii–­x xviii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Jenkins, David  T. The Cambridge History of Western Textiles. Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 2003. John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019. Public Law 115-232. 115th Congress. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Publishing Office, August 13, 2018. Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the En­glish Language: In Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, Explained in Their Dif­fer­ent Meanings, and Authorized by the Names of Writers in Whose Works They are Found. Edited by Alexander Chal­mers. ­London: C. and J. Rivington, 1824. Jones, David  J. Gothic Machine: Textualities, Pre-­cinematic Media and Film in Popu­lar Visual Culture, 1670–1910. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011. Jones, Matthew L. Reckoning with ­Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Kantor, Jamison. “Horace Walpole and the Fate of Finance.” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 58, no. 2 (2017): 135–155. Kassell, Lauren. “Medical Understandings of the Body, c. 1500–1750.” In The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, edited by Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher, 57–74. London: Routledge, 2013. Kaufman, Robert. “Legislators of the Post-­ Everything World: Shelley’s ‘Defence’ of Adorno.” ELH 63, no. 3 (1996): 707–733. —­—­—. “The Work of Romanticism in the Age of Mechanical Postmodernism.” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 12, no. 2 (2001): 237–245. ­ iddle Ages. London: Kelly, Kathleen Coyne. Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the M Routledge, 2000. Kennedy, Robert C. “Probe Away.” HarpWeek. Accessed June 2019. https://­w ww​.­harpweek​​ .­com​/­09Cartoon​/­BrowseByDateCartoon​.a­ sp​?M ­ onth​=­March&Date​=1­ 8. Ketabgian, Tamara S. The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Lit­er­a­ ture and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Kim, Dorothy. “Introduction to Lit­er­a­ture Compass Special Cluster: Critical Race and the ­Middle Ages.” Lit­er­a­ture Compass 16, nos. 9–10 (2019): 1–16.

Bibliogr aph y

187

King, Kathryn  R. “The Novel before Novels (with a Glance at Mary Hearne’s Fables of Desertion).” In Eighteenth-­Century Genre and Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms, Essays in Honor of J. Paul Hunter, edited by Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall, 36–57. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Kirchgaessner, Stephanie, Paul Lewis, David Pegg, Sam Cutler, Nina Lakhani, and Michael Safi. “Revealed: Leak Uncovers Global Abuse of Cyber-­Surveillance Weapon.” The Guardian, July  18, 2021. https://­w ww​.­t heguardian​.c­ om​/­world​/­2021​/­jul​/­18​/­revealed​-­leak​ -­uncovers​-­global​-­abuse​-­of​-­c yber​-­surveillance​-­weapon​-n ­ so​-­group​-­pegasus. Krajewski, Markus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Cata­logs, 1548–1929. Translated by Peter Krapp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Kramnick, Jonathan. “Against Literary Darwinism.” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2 (2011): 315–347. Kuiken, Kir. ­Imagined Sovereignties: ­Toward a New Po­liti­cal Romanticism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. ­L abour Party. For the Many, Not the Few: The L ­ abour Party Manifesto 2017. October 2017. https://­labour​.­org​.u ­ k​/­w p​-­content​/­uploads​/2­ 017​/­10​/­labour​-­manifesto​-­2017​.­pdf. Lähteenmäki, Vili. “Locke and Active Perception.” In Active Perception in the History of Philosophy: From Plato to Modern Philosophy, edited by José Filipe Silva and Mikko Yrjönsuuri, 223–240. New York: Springer, 2014. Landes, David. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000. Landy, Joshua. How to Do ­Things with Fictions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-­Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. —­—­—. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Leake, John. Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Midwifery. London, 1787. LeMenager, Stephanie. “Climate Change and the Strug­gle for Genre.” In Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, edited by Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak ­Taylor, 220–238. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Letellier, Robert Ignatius. The En­glish Novel, 1700–1740: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Letter reproduced in Three Hours ­after Marriage. Dublin, 1761. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015. Lewis, Michael. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. New York: Norton, 2011. Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. The ­Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Lezra, Jacques. Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Eu­rope. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Lieberman, Jennifer  L. “Finding a Place for Technology.” JLS: Journal of Lit­er­a­ture and Science 10, no. 1 (2017): 26–31. ­ uman Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning H Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Loewenstein, Joseph. The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Loretelli, Rosamaria. “The Aesthetics of Empiricism and the Origin of the Novel.” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 41, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 83–109.

188 B i b l i o g r a p h y Loughlin, Marie  H. Hymeneutics: Interpreting Virginity on the Early Modern Stage. ­Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1997. Löwy, Michael. Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Cap­i­tal­ist Catastrophe. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015. Lupton, Christina. “Contingency, Codex, the Eighteenth-­Century Novel.” ELH 81, no.  4 (Winter 2014): 1173–1192. Luttfring, Sara D. “Bodily Narratives and the Politics of Virginity in The Changeling and the Essex Divorce.” Re­nais­sance Drama 39, no. 1 (2011): 97–128. Lynall, Gregory. Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics, and Theology of Natu­ral Knowledge, 1690–1730. New York: Springer, 2012. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The History of ­England from the Accession of James II. Vol. 2. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849. ­ atter: Eigh­ Mack, Ruth. “Hogarth’s Practical Aesthetics.” In Mind, Body, Motion, M teenth-­Century British and French Literary Perspectives, edited by Mary Helen McMurray and Alison Conway, 21–46. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. —­—­—. “Paper ­Castle, Paper Collection: Walpole’s Extra-­Illustrated Copy of the Description of . . . ​Strawberry Hill.” In Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, edited by Michael Snodin and Cynthia Roman, 107–115. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. MacKenzie, Scott. “My Chapter upon Lines: Motion, Deviation, and Lineation in Eighteenth-­ Century British Aesthetics.” Criticism 61, no. 1 (2019): 1–26. ­ astle, in the County of Essex. London: John Majendie, Lewis. An Account of Hedingham C Nichols, 1796. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso, 2016. Mann, Jenny  C. The ­Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2021. Mann, Jenny C., and Debapriya Sarkar, eds. “Imagining Early Modern Scientific Forms.” Special issue, Philological Quarterly 98, no. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 2019). Mannheimer, Katherine. “The Scriblerian Stage and Page: Three Hours a­ fter Marriage, Pope’s ‘Minor’ Poems, and the Prob­lem of Genre-­History.” Comparative Drama 43, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 63–88. Maravall, José Antonio. La cultural del barroco: Análisis de una estructura histórica. ­Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1975. Marchitello, Howard, and Evelyn Tribble, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Lit­er­at­ ure and Science. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Margócsy, Dániel. Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Marks, Richard. “The Reception and Display of Northern Eu­ro­pean Roundels in E ­ ngland.” Gesta 37, no. 2 (1998): 217–224. Marsden, Ben. Watt’s Perfect Engine: Steam and the Age of Invention. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Marten, John. Gonosologium Novum. London, 1709. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1990. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engel. Collected Works. Vol. 11. New York: International Publishers, 1979. Massey, Lyle. “Pregnancy and Pathology: Picturing Childbirth in Eighteenth-­Century Obstetric Atlases.” The Art Bulletin 87, no. 1 (March 2005): 73–91. Maxwell, Lynn. Wax Impressions, Figures, and Forms in Early Modern Lit­er­a­ture: Wax Works. New York: Springer, 2019.

Bibliogr aph y

189

—­—­—. “Wax Magic and The Duchess of Malfi.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2014): 31–54. Mazzio, Carla. “The Invisible Ele­ment in Art: Dürer, Shakespeare, Donne.” In Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Eu­rope, edited by Alina Alexandra Payne, 138–166. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. McClean, Bethany, and Joseph Nocera. All The Dev­ils Are ­Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2011. ­ entury. McClellan, James E., III. Science Reor­ga­nized: Scientific Socie­ties in the Eigh­teenth C New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. McCorduck, Pamela. Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence. Natick, MA: A. K. Peters, 1979. McGrath, Alice Tweedy. “Unaccountable Form: Queer Failure and Jane Barker’s Patchwork Method.” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 60, no. 4 (2019): 353–373. McKenny, John. “Swift’s Prescience: A Polite Precursor of Corpus Linguistics.” Journal of Language and Lit­er­at­ ure 2, no. 1 (2003): 47–65. McNeill, J. R., and Peter Engelke. The ­Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Meisel, Martin. Chaos ­Imagined: Lit­e r­a­ture, Art, Science. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Mikhail, Alan. “Enlightenment Anthropocene.” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 49, no.  2 (2016): 211–231. Miller, David Philip. James Watt, Chemist: Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009. Milton, John. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. Vol. 3. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962. Misson, Henri. Memoires et observations faites par un voyageur en Angleterre. The Hague: Henri van Bulderen, 1698. Mitchell, Robert. Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Lit­er­a­ture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Mitchell, W.J.T. Articulate Images: The S­ ister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Moore, Jason. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecol­ogy and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso, 2015. Morning Chronicle (London). November 25, 1794. Morning Post (London). November 29, 1794. Morning Post and Fash­ion­able World (London). September 19, 1794. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecol­ogy a­ fter the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Motte, Andrew. A Treatise of the Mechanical Powers, Wherein the Laws of Motions, and the Properties of Th ­ ose Powers Are Explain’d and Demonstrated in an Easy and Familiar Method. London: Motte, 1733. Muirhead, James Patrick. The Origin and Pro­gress of the Mechanical Inventions of James Watt. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1854. Müller, Simone M., and Heidi J. S. Tworek. “­Imagined Use as a Category of Analy­sis: New Approaches to the History of Technology.” History and Technology 32, no. 2 (2016): 105–119. Müller-­Sievers, Helmut. The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth ­Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and ­There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

190 B i b l i o g r a p h y Muri, Allison. The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the ­Human Machine, 1660–1830. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Nägele, Rainer. Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Newton, Isaac. “Author’s Preface to the Reader.” In The Principia: Mathematical Princi­ples of Natu­ral Philosophy, translated by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, assisted by Julia Budenz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 382. Nicholson, Michael. “Fugitive Pieces: Walpole, Byron, and Queer Time.” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 60, no. 2 (2019): 139–162. Nicolson, Marjorie. “The Microscope and En­glish Imagination.” Smith College Studies in Modern Languages 16, no. 4 (1935): 1–92. Nicolson, Marjorie, and Nora M. Mohler. “The Scientific Background of Swift’s Voyage to Laputa.” Annals of Science 2, no. 3 (1937): 299–334. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, and David Stuart Rodes. Introduction to The Virtuoso, by Thomas Shadwell, xi–­x xvi. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. Norman, Don. The Psy­chol­ogy of Everyday ­Things. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Nunn, Hillary  M. Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. OED Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://­w ww​.­oed​.­com. Offray de La Mettrie, Julien. La Mettrie: Machine Man and Other Writings. Edited by Ann Thomson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Ogée, Frédéric. “From Text to Image: William Hogarth and the Emergence of a Visual Culture in Eighteenth-­Century ­England.” In Hogarth: Representing Nature’s Machines, edited by David Bindman, Frédéric Ogée, and Peter Wagner, 3–22. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Ortiz, Ivan. “Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Modern Transport.” PhD diss., ­Prince­ton University, 2013. Otis, Laura. Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth ­Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Owens, Margaret E. “John Webster, Tussaud Laureate: The Waxworks in ‘The Duchess of Malfi.’ ” ELH 79, no. 4 (2012): 851–877. Paine, Thomas. The Rights of Man. London: J. S. Jordan, 1791. Parker, E. A Complete KEY to the New Farce, Call’d “Three Hours a­ fter Marriage.” London, 1717. Pasanek, Brad, and Chad Wellmon. “The Enlightenment Index.” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 56, no. 3 (2015): 359–382. Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth. Vol. 3, Art and Politics, 1750–1764. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Payne, Alina Alexandra. Introduction to Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Eu­rope, edited by Alina Alexandra Payne, 1–9. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. Peover, Michael. “Stained and Painted Glass.” In Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, edited by Michael Snodin and Cynthia Roman, 64–65. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Peover, Michael, and Kevin Rogers. “New Light on Strawberry Hill: Walpole’s Display of Glass and the Repre­sen­ta­tion of the Ancient Abbey.” Journal of Stained Glass 34 (2010): 8–52. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A Se­lection. Edited by Robert Latham. London: Penguin, 2003.

Bibliogr aph y

191

Petzold, Andreas. “Stained Glass in the Age of Neoclassicism: The Case of Eglington ­Margaret Pearson.” British Art Journal 2, no. 1 (2000): 54–60. Picciotto, Joanna. ­Labors of Innocence in Early Modern ­England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Poovey, Mary. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth-­and Nineteenth-­Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. —­—­—. A History of the Modern Fact: Prob­lems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pope, Alexander. The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., in Verse and Prose: Containing the Principal Notes of Drs. Warburton and Warton. Edited by William Lisle Bowles, William Warburton, and Joseph Warton. Vols. 3–6. London: J. Johnson, 1806. Porter, Roy, and Lesley Hall. The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Powell, Thomas. Humane Industry; or, A History of the Manual Arts, Deducing the Original, Pro­gress, and Improvement of Them. London, 1661. Puckett, Kent. Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Puetz, Anne. “Design Instructions for Artisans in Eighteenth-­Century Britain.” Journal of Design History 12, no. 3 (1999): 217–239. Pursell, Carroll. “Seeing the Invisible: New Perceptions in the History of Technology.” Icon 1 (1995): 9–15. —­—­—. “Technologies as Cultural Practice and Production.” Technology and Culture 51, no. 3 (2010): 715–722. Rabinbach, Anson. The ­Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Racevskis, Roland. Time and Ways of Knowing ­under Louis XIV: Molière, Sévigné, Lafayette. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003. Rajan, Tilottama. Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. —­—­—. “The Work of the Negative: Symbolic, Gothic, and Romantic in Shelley and Hegel.” Studies in Romanticism 52, no. 1 (2013): 3–32. Randall, Dale  B.  J. “Some Observations on the Theme of Chastity in The Changeling.” En­glish Literary Re­nais­sance 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1984): 347–366. Redfield, Marc. The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Reeve, Matthew M. “Dickie Bateman and the Gothicization of Old Windsor: Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole.” Architectural History 56 (2013): 97–131. —­—­—. Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. Reeves, Eileen. Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1997. Reteshka, Joan Rose. “An Edition of Mrs.  Hearne’s ‘The Lover’s Week’ and ‘The Female Deserters.’ ” PhD diss., Duquesne University, 1998. Rhodes, Neil, and Jonathan Sawday. “Introduction: Paperworlds: Imagining the Re­nais­ sance Computer.” In The Re­nais­sance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print, edited by Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday, 1–16. London: Routledge, 2000. Ridley, Mark. A Short Treatise of Magneticall Bodies and Motions. London: Nicholas Okes, 1613.

192 B i b l i o g r a p h y Robbins, John. “Up in the Air: Balloonomania and Scientific Per­for­mance.” Eighteenth-­ Century Studies 48, no. 4 (2015): 521–538. Rod­gers, Johannah. “The Genealogy of an Image, or, What Does Lit­er­a­ture (Not) Have to Do with the History of Computing? Tracing the Sources and Reception of Gulliver’s ‘Knowledge Engine.’ ” Humanities 6, no. 85 (2017): 1–9. Rose, Mark. Authors and ­Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Rosen, William. The Most Power­ful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010. Rothstein, Eric. Systems of Order and Inquiry in ­Later Eighteenth-­Century Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. ­ ngland. London, 1755. Rouquet, Jean Andre. The Pre­sent State of the Arts in E Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques. The Social Contract. Translated by G.D.H. Cole. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1923. Russell, Ben. James Watt: Making the World Anew. London: Reaktion, 2014. Ruston, Sharon. Shelley and Vitality. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Saccaro-­Battisti, Giuseppa. “Changing Meta­phors of Po­liti­cal Thought.” Journal of the History of Ideas 44, no. 1 (1983): 31–54. “Sailing of Bonaparte.” The Morning Post (London), August 7, 1815. Salih, Sarah. “Performing Virginity: Sex and Vio­lence in the Katherine Group.” In Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the ­Middle Ages, edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl, 95–112. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Sampson, Martin W., ed. Thomas Middleton. New York: American Book Com­pany, 1915. Sawday, Jonathan. Engines of the Imagination: Re­nais­sance Culture and the Rise of the Machine. London: Routledge, 2007. Schaffer, Simon. “Enlightened Automata.” In The Sciences in Enlightened Eu­rope, edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, 126–165. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Schmitt, Carl. Po­liti­cal Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Schonhorn, Manuel. “Defoe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’: Topography and Intention.” Review of En­glish Studies, n.s., 19 (1968): 378–402. Schwartz, Matthew S. “Huawei Sues U.S. ­a fter Congress Bans Government Purchase of Its Equipment.” NPR, March 7, 2019. https://­w ww​.n ­ pr​.­org​/­2019​/­03​/­07​/­700989603​/­huawei​ -­sues​-­u​-­s​-­a fter​-­congress​-­bans​-­government​-­purchase​-­of​-­its​-­equipment. Scott, Walter. Introduction to The ­Castle of Otranto (1811), by Horace Walpole. In Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage, edited by Peter Sabor, 88–98. New York: Routledge, 2007. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York: Methuen, 1986. —­—­—. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, ­You’re So Paranoid You Prob­ably Think This Essay Is about You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 123–152. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Serres, Michel. “Turner Translates Carnot.” In Hermes: Lit­er­a­ture, Science, Philosophy, edited and translated by Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell, 55–62. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. OpenSource Shakespeare. Accessed July  2019. https://­w ww​.­opensourceshakespeare​.­org​/­v iews​/­plays​/­play​_­v iew​.­php​?­WorkID​=­tempest​ &Act​=1­ &Scene​=2­ &Scope​= ­scene. Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Bibliogr aph y

193

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-­Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985. Sharp, Jane. The Midwives Book. London, 1671. Shelley, Mary. Preface to Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, iii–­viii. London: John and Henry L. Hunt, 1824. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Vol. 2, Shelley in Italy. Edited by Frederick L. Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. —­—­—. Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: John and Henry  L. Hunt, 1824. —­—­—. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Edited by Donald  H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. New York: Norton, 2002. Shenstone, William. The Poetical Works of William Shenstone. Vol. 1. London, 1780. Sherburn, George. “The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Three Hours a­ fter Marriage.” Modern Philology 24, no. 1 (August 1926): 91–109. Sherman, Stuart. Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and En­glish Diurnal Form, 1660–1785. ­Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. Translated by Benjamin Sher. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990. Sielke, Sabine. “Science Studies and Lit­er­a­ture.” Anglia 133, no. 1 (2015): 9–21. Silver, Sean R. “Visiting Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Historiography.” Eigh­ teenth ­Century Fiction 21, no. 4 (2009): 535–564. Silverstein, Marc. “ ‘Body-­Presence’: Cixous’s Phenomenology of Theater.” Theatre Journal 43, no. 4 (December 1991): 507–516. Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cécile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017. Simpson, A.D.C. “Reeve, Richard (d. 1666), Maker of Optical Instruments.” In Oxford ­Dictionary of National Biography: In Association with the British Acad­emy: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/48372. Sinibaldi, Giovanni Benedetto. Rare Verities: The Cabinet of Venus Unlocked and Her Secrets Laid Open. London, 1658. Slack, Paul. The Invention of Improvement: Information and Material Pro­gress in Seven­ teenth-­Century ­England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Sloman, Judith. “The Time Scheme of Defoe’s Roxana.” En­glish Studies in Canada 5, no. 4 (1979): 406–419. Smith, Adam T. The Po­liti­cal Machine: Assembling Sovereignty in the Bronze Age Caucasus. Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015. Smith, Bruce D., and Melinda A. Zeder. “The Onset of the Anthropocene.” Anthropocene 4 (2013): 8–13. Smith, Courtney Weiss. Empiricist Devotions: Science, Religion, and Poetry in Early Eigh­ teenth-­Century ­England. Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 2016. Smith, Pamela  H. “Art, Science, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Eu­rope.” Isis 97 (March 2006): 83–100. —­—­—. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Prob­lem of His Time. New York: Walker and Com­pany, 1995. Solomon, Alex. “The Novel and the Bowling Green: Toby Shandy’s Diagrammatic Realism.” Philological Quarterly 95, no. 2 (2016): 269–291.

194 B i b l i o g r a p h y Spadafora, David. The Idea of Pro­gress in Eighteenth-­Century Britain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Spiller, Elizabeth. Science, Reading, and Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Sprat, Thomas. “History of the Royal Society.” In En­glish Science, Bacon to Newton, edited by Brian Vickers, 160–182. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Stalnaker, Joanna. Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Stanyon, Miranda. “Serpentine Sighs: De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis and the Serpentine Line.” Studies in Romanticism 53, no. 1 (2014): 31–58. ­ ittle Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. BerkeStates, Bert O. ­Great Reckonings in L ley: University of California Press, 1985. Stauffer, Andrew. Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a Gentleman. London: Penguin, 2003. St. James’s Chronicle or the British Eve­ning Post. September 18, 1794. Stolberg, Michael. “Examining the Body, c. 1500–1750.” In The Routledge History of Sex and the Body, edited by Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher, 91–105. London: Routledge, 2013. Streeck, Wolfgang. How ­Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System. London: Verso, 2016. Stuart, Robert. A Descriptive History of the Steam Engine. London: Knight and Lacey, 1824. Sudan, Rajani. The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. ­Sullivan, Richard J. “Patent Counts and Textile Invention: A Comment on Griffiths, Hunt, and O’Brien.” Journal of Economic History 55, no. 3 (1995): 666–670. Summers, David. “Maniera and Movement: The Figura Serpentinata.” Art Quarterly 35 (1972): 269–273. Swartz, Kelly. “The Maxims of Swift’s Psychological Fiction.” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 30, no. 1 (2017): 1–23. Swift, Jonathan. “A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit.” In The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift, edited by Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins, 112–126. New York: Norton, 2010. —­—­—. Gulliver’s Travels. Edited by Peter Dixon and John Chalker. Baltimore: Penguin, 1967. —­—­—. Gulliver’s Travels. Edited by Albert J. Rivero. New York: Norton, 2002. —­—­—. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift. Vol. 11. Edited by Herbert Davis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1941. —­—­—. A Tale of a Tub, to Which Is Added The ­Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit. 2nd ed. Edited by A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith. Oxford, 1968. —­—­—. The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, DD . . . ​with Notes, Historical and Critical. Edited by Thomas Sheridan and John Nichols. Vol. 3. London: J. Johnson, 1808. Taylor, Jesse Oak. “The Novel a­ fter Nature, Nature a­ fter the Novel: Richard Jefferies’s Anthropocene Romance.” Studies in the Novel 50, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 108–133. Teltscher, Kate. India Inscribed: Eu­ro­pean and British Writing on India, 1600–1800. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. Thomasen, Laura Søvsø, and Henrik Kragh Sørensen. “The Irony of Romantic Mathe­matics: Bridging the Historiographies of Lit­er­a­ture and Mathe­matics.” Configurations 24, no.  1 (2016): 53–70.

Bibliogr aph y

195

Thompson, E.  P. “Time, Work-­Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Pre­sent 38 (1967): 56–97. Thorne, Christian. “Providence in the Early Novel, or Accident If You Please.” MLQ 64, no. 3 (2003): 323–347. Thurschwell, Pamela. Lit­er­a­ture, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Tierney-­Hynes, Rebecca. “Fictional Mechanics: Haywood, Reading, and the Passions.” The Eigh­teenth ­Century 51, nos. 1–2 (Spring–­Summer 2010): 153–172. “Tired of In­equality? One Economist Says It’ll Only Get Worse: Interview with Tyler Cowen.” NPR, September 12, 2013. http://­w ww​.­npr​.­org ​/­templates​/­t ranscript/transcript​ .php?storyId=221425582. Tullo, Ellen. “Duke Ferdinand: Patient or Possessed? The Reflection of Con­temporary Medical Discourse in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi.” Medical Humanities 36, no. 1 (2010): 19–22. Turley, Hans. “The Anomalous Fiction of Mary Hearne.” Studies in the Novel 30, no.  2 (1998): 139–149. Turner, Henry S. “Lessons from Lit­er­a­t ure for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflections on ‘Form.’ ” Isis 101, no. 3 (2010): 578–589. Turner, Tom. En­glish Garden Design: History and Styles since 1650. Suffolk, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1986. Usher, Penelope Meyers. “ ‘I Do Understand Your Inside’: The Animal beneath the Skin in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi.” Medieval and Re­nais­sance Drama in ­England 30 (2017): 105–125. Venette, Nicolas. The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’d. 2nd ed. London, 1707. Vermeir, Koen. “The Magic of the Magic Lantern (1660–1700): On Analogical Demonstration and the Visualization of the Invisible.” British Society for the History of Science 38, no. 2 (2005): 127–159. Vincent, Clare, and Jan Hendrik Leopold. Eu­ro­pean Clocks and Watches in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Highlights of the Collection. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015. Vovelle, Michel. The Fall of the French Monarchy, 1787–1792. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Wahrig, Bettina. “Clocks with Hands: Instruments, Hands and Parturients in a Changing Horizon of Time.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 35, no. 1 (2013): 61–67. Walpole, Horace. The ­Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Edited by Nick Groom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. —­—­—. A Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole, Youn­gest Son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-­Hill, Near Twickenham. With an Inventory of the Furniture, Pictures, Curiosities, &c. Twickenham, UK: Strawberry Hill Press, 1784. —­—­—. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence. Edited by W. S. Lewis. 48 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937–1983. —­—­—. The Mysterious M ­ other: A Tragedy. Twickenham, UK: Strawberry Hill Press, 1768. Wang, Orrin N. C. Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Wasserman, Earl. Shelley: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi. Edited by Michael Neill. New York: Norton, 2015.

196 B i b l i o g r a p h y Wecker, Johann Jacob. Eigh­teen Books of the Secrets of Art & Nature. London, 1660. Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas Viscus. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Weiss, Eric A. “Anecdotes: Jonathan Swift’s Computing Invention.” Annals of the History of Computing 7, no. 2 (1985): 164–165. Westin, Shannon. “The Obstetric Forceps: Shrouded in Mystery.” Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey 61, no. 6 (June 2006): 357–358. Wharton, Joanna. “Maria Edgeworth and the Telegraph.” Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review 31, no. 6 (2020): 747–765. Whitehall Eve­ning Post. September 27, 1794. Whiston, William. A New Theory of the Earth, from Its Original, to the Consummation of all ­Things. London: Motte, 1737. Wickman, Matthew. Lit­er­a­ture a­fter Euclid: The Geometric Imagination in the Long ­Scottish Enlightenment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Williams, George Walton. Introduction to The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton and ­William Rowley, ix–­x xiv. Edited by George Walton Williams. Lincoln: University of Ne­ braska Press, 1966. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Lit­er­a­ture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Williams, Rosalind. “The Lantern-­Bearers of the History of Technology.” History and Technology 29, no. 3 (2013): 262–277. Wilson, Adrian. The Making of Man-­Midwifery: Childbirth in ­England, 1660–1770. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Wilson, Geoffrey. The Old Telegraphs. London: Philimore, 1976. Wilson, Ross. Shelley and the Apprehension of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Winton, Calhoun. John Gay and the London Theatre. Lexington: University Press of ­Kentucky, 1993. Witmore, Michael. “Arrow, Acrobat and Phoenix: On Sense and Motion in En­glish Civic Pageantry.” In The Automaton in En­glish Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture, edited by Wendy Beth Hyman, 109–127. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Wolfe, Jessica. Humanism, Machinery, and Re­nais­sance Lit­er­a­ture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Wolfson, Susan. Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Words­worth, William. Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–1800. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Worshipful Com­ pany of Clockmakers. The Clockmakers’ Farther Reasons against Mr. Hutchinson’s Bill and Printed Reasons. London, 1712. —­—­—. Reasons Humbly Offered . . . ​against the Bill, Entituled, a Bill for Securing to Mr. John Hutchinson the Property of a Movement In­ven­ted by Him for the More Exact Mea­sur­ing of Time. London, 1712. Yahav, Amit  S. Feeling Time: Duration, the Novel, and Eighteenth-­Century Sensibility. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. —­—­—. “Time, Duration, and Defoe’s Novels.” Partial Answers: Journal of Lit­er­a­ture and the History of Ideas 6, no. 1 (2008): 33–56. Yang, Chi-­ming. “Asia Out of Place: The Aesthetics of Incorruptibility in Behn’s Oroonoko.” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 42, no. 2 (2009): 235–253. Ylivuori, Soile. “Rethinking Female Chastity and Gentlewomen’s Honour in Eighteenth-­ Century E ­ ngland.” The Historical Journal 59, no. 1 (March 2016): 71–97. Young, Helen. “Race, Medievalism and the Eighteenth-­Century Gothic Turn.” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 11, no. 4 (2020): 468–475.

Bibliogr aph y

197

Zitin, Abigail. Practical Form: Abstraction, Technique, and Beauty in Eighteenth-­Century Aesthetics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Zuroski, Eugenia. “ ‘That You May Show Us What We Have Seen’: Bentley’s Drawings and the Archive of Queer Feeling.” Paper presented at “Text Artefact Identity: Horace Walpole and the Queer Eigh­teenth ­Century,” Twickenham, UK, February 2019.

Notes on Contributors

Joseph Drury is an associate professor of En­glish at Villanova University in ­ illanova, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Novel Machines: Technology and NarV rative Form in Enlightenment Britain, as well as several articles on the intersections of eighteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture, science, and technology. Laura Francis is a PhD candidate in the Department of Lit­er­a­tures in En­glish at  Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She specializes in sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century writing, with a par­tic­u­lar focus on translation theory, baroque aesthetics, and the influence of Spanish culture in ­England. While her dissertation explores how the pro­cess of translation s­haped the expansion of early modern empires into the worlds around them, she maintains a keen interest in specifically scientific exchanges through her other pre­sen­ta­tions and work in the digital humanities. Her research has been supported by the Government of Ireland, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University, and the ­Cornell Society for the Humanities. Kristin M. Girten is an associate professor of En­glish and assistant vice chancellor for the arts and humanities at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her research focuses on intersections between lit­er­a­ture, philosophy, and science in the British Enlightenment, giving special emphasis to how w ­ omen and other marginalized groups contribute to and feel the effects of such intersections. Her first book, currently in pro­gress, establishes an alternative history of knowledge making in the long Enlightenment era by tracing feminist practices of empirical witnessing across the period. Her essays have appeared in Eighteenth-­Century Studies and The Eigh­teenth ­Century: Theory and Interpretation. Aaron R. Hanlon is an associate professor of En­g lish and chair of the Science, Technology, and Society program at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He  is  the author of A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism. 199

200

Notes on Contr ibutors

Erik L. Johnson is a lecturer in the humanities department at San José State University in California, where he teaches in the school’s Humanities Honors program. His publications include “Life beyond Life: Reading Milton’s Areopagitica through Enlightenment Vitalism” in Eighteenth-­Century Studies and pieces on teaching William Congreve and William Wycherley in the collection How to Teach a Play: Essential Exercises for Popu­lar Plays, edited by Miriam Chirico and Kelly Younger. Jamison Kantor is an assistant professor of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture at the Ohio State University. His first book, Honor, Romanticism, and the Hidden Value of Modernity, pits the economized and oftentimes reactionary concept of “liberty” against honor, a surprisingly radical social idea found in many cultural forms, from landscape poetry to the media of the Black diaspora. His second book, currently in pro­gress, expands this critique of rationalist value to structures of automation—­and “automatic materiality”—­found in lit­er­a­ture and art from 1750 to 1850. Kantor’s essays have also appeared in The Eigh­teenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, PMLA, and Jump Cut. Kevin MacDonnell is an assistant professor of humanities at Mas­sa­chu­setts Maritime Acad­emy in Buzzards Bay, Mas­sa­chu­setts. His book proj­ect, “Genres of Innovation: Empire, Environment, and Economy in the Eighteenth-­Century British Atlantic,” examines how eighteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture s­ haped the reception and application of the innovations that would marshal the onset of British hegemony in the Atlantic world. His most recent publications can be found in Philological Quarterly and Green Theory & Praxis. Zachary M. Mann is a doctoral candidate in En­glish lit­er­a­ture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He has published on new media, tele­v i­ sion, and film history, most recently on the ­career of Myrna Loy. His dissertation traces the co-­evolutions of machine programming and conceptions of authorship from the eigh­teenth ­century to t­ oday. Thomas A. Oldham is an assistant professor of theatre studies at Texas A&M University–­Corpus Christi. Recent publications include “Philip Ridley: Still In-­Yer-­ Face” in the edited collection ­After In-­Yer-­Face: Remnants of a Theatrical Revolution and “The Affective Appeal of Vio­lence and the Violent Appeal of Affect: Titus Andronicus, Lucy Bailey, and Shakespeare’s Globe” in the journal Shakespeare Bulletin. He previously taught at Colby College, Indiana University, and Indiana State University, and holds dramaturgy credits from professional and educational theaters in Nebraska, Maine, Indiana, and New York. Deven M. Parker is a postdoctoral research associate in the School of En­glish and Drama at Queen Mary University of London, where she works on the British Acad­emy proj­ect “Romantic Melodrama: Feeling in Search of Form.” She specializes in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture, theater, and media history. Her most recent publications include “Precarious Correspondence in The ­Woman

Notes on Contr ibutors

201

of Colour” in Essays in Romanticism and “Romanticism’s Radical Connectivity” in Eu­ro­pean Romantic Review. Emily  M. West is an assistant professor in the Department of En­glish at the ­ niversity of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her work focuses on embodiment and material U culture in the long eigh­teenth c­ entury. She has recently published on penmanship in “Technologies of Epistolarity and Embodiment in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a ­Woman of Plea­sure” in The Eigh­teenth ­Century: Theory and Interpretation and on pedagogical toys in “Animal Th ­ ings, ­Human Language, and C ­ hildren’s Education” in Eighteenth-­Century Fiction. She is currently completing a book proj­ect on technology and gendered embodiment.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Académie des sciences, 89 actor-­network theory. See science studies Admiralty Office: telegraph atop headquarters at Charing Cross, 125; telegraph instal­ lation, 128 Aeolian harp, 173 air-­pump, 1–2. See also Boyle, Robert Alker, Sharon, 135–136 allegory, 145–146 amatory fiction and romance, 36–38, 44n24, 44n26 Analy­sis of Beauty, The (Hogarth), 80, 83, 84, 85–87, 90; influence on Sterne, 90–94; line of beauty, 80, 82, 83, 85–87. See also Hogarth, William anatomy, 16, 27 anatomy theaters, and relationship with drama, 28n16 Ancients vs. Moderns, 61, 68–69; and nationalism, 5; “natu­ral philosophy,” 4; phi­los­o­phers of, 3; practical application and, 4; quarrel between, 11 animal studies. See posthumanism Anthropocene, 11, 79–80, 82, 91, 94, 169 Arbuthnot, John, 46; Three Hours a­ fter Marriage, 46–47, 49, 51–56 Aristotele’s Master-­Piece, 48, 49 Aristotle, 21–22 Astley, Philip, 126 Atwood, Margaret, 174 Augustine, St., on time, 32, 38–39, 41 authorship, 63, 69–73, 75n14. See also copyright; intellectual property automata, 61, 75n11 automaticity, 141, 145, 152–153, 157, 163n112

automation, 62, 66–70, 72; jacquard loom and its pre­de­ces­sors, 62, 66; machine programmability, 65–66, 75n12; punch card systems, 62, 66, 69, 73 automaton(s), 139–140, 148, 151 automobile, 170 Bacon, Francis, 2, 4–5, 15, 27n8, 62, 67, 70, 114, 151, 157 ballooning craze of the 1780s, 169–170 Barbauld, Anna, 1 baroque: as an aesthetic, 15–16, 18–19, 21, 23–25, 27, 29; painting, 15; tragedy, 23–24 Barret, Robert, 48 Behn, Aphra, 36 Bender, John, 168 Benjamin, Walter, 23–25 Bentham, Jeremy, 141, 143, 147–148 Bentley, Richard, 99, 102, 103, 108 Berkeley, George, 45n33 Biagioli, Mario, 174 Bible, and biblical allusion, 40–41 Black, Joseph, 90 Blackfriars, 14 Blackfriars Theatre, 17 blackness, 118 Blake, William, 11 Boulton, Matthew, 79, 89–90 Boyle, Robert, 1–2 British Eve­ning Post (London), 125 Brown, Capability, 83 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 15 Burke, Edmund, 143 Burton, Robert, 27

203

204 I n d e x calculating machines, 67 Camus, Albert, 174: The Plague, 174 capitalism, 140, 142, 154–155, 163n114; fictitious capital, 139–140, 155 Catholicism, 107, 109 Cavendish, Margaret, 2, 6 Chamberlayne, Thomas, 48 Chamberlen f­ amily, 50–51 Chapman, Edmund, 51 Chappe, Claude, 125, 130–131, 170 Charlemont, Earl of, 129–130 Charles II (king), 39 chinoiserie, 108, 118 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 21 Clarke, Arthur C., 173 Clockmakers Outcry against the Author of the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, The, 173 clocks, 170, 172, 173. See also timekeeping technology cogito, 23 Cohen, Ashley, 135 Cold War, 174 collaboration, 99, 108 Collier, Mary, 172 commercialism, 70, 73 Congreve, William, The Way of the World, 32, 34–35 consciousness, and experience of time, 34, 36–37, 39–41 copyright, 63, 69–73, 75n14, 166. See also authorship; intellectual property Courier and Eve­ning Gazette (London), 125–126 Cowley, Abraham, 2 Cowper, William, 48 Crooke, Helkiah, 48 Cruikshank, George, 148–151, 160n67 Crutzen, Paul, 79 cryonics, 173 Culpeper, Nicholas, 48, 49, 52 Curll, Edmund, 36, 44n23 cyborgs, 11–12 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, 151 day, mea­sure­ment of, 40–41, 43n13 Defoe, Daniel, 172, 174: and Chris­tian­ity, 32, 40–41, 45n34; chronology and time schemes in his fiction, 39–41, 44n29; re­­ sponse to Locke, 39–41, 45n33; subjectivity and personal identity in, 39–40. Works: A Journal of the Plague Year, 39, 44n29, 174; Moll Flanders, 39; Robinson Crusoe, 39–41, 172; Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress, 39, 44n29 De Man, Paul, 141, 145, 151, 155 Derrida, Jacques, 165

Descartes, René, 21–23, 26 Devereux, Robert, 3rd Earl of Essex, 47 devices, 14–18, 24, 27n8 diary and diurnal form, 33, 36–37, 40–41 Dibdin, Charles, ­Great News, or a Trip to the Antipodes, 127–128 Diderot, Denis, 71–72 Donaldson v. Becket, 166 Donne, John, 27 Douglas, Aileen, 123, 137n6 dreams, 99, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112 Duck, Stephen, 172 duration, concept of, 31–32, 34, 39–41 East India Com­pany, 132–134 echo, 16–17, 24–26, 30n59 Edgerton, David, 171 Edgeworth, Maria, 170, 171, 172–173, 173–174. Works: “An Essay on the Art of Conveying Secret and Swift Intelligence,” 129–131, 134; “Lame Jervas,” 172–173, 173–174; “Lame Jervas” (in Popu­lar Tales), 123–124, 129, 131–136; Letter to the Right Hon. The Earl of Charlemont . . . ​, 129–130 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 171, 173; invention of portable telegraph, 129. Works: “An Essay on the Art of Conveying Secret and Swift Intelligence,” 129–131, 134; Letter to the Right Hon. The Earl of Charlemont . . . ​, 129–130 Enlightenment, 14, 68–69, 80, 91, 93–94, 101, 112, 114, 116, 118, 142–143, 151, 157, 169 environmental humanities, 11 epistolary fiction, 36–38 eternity, as temporal concept, 31, 38–39, 41, 42n1 Etmullerus, Michael, 48 experience, 16, 23, 26 experiment, 1–2, 16–17, 20–23, 26 explosion, concept of, 101, 107, 109, 112, 118 Eyre, Baron James, 166 Fairclough, Mary, 123, 127 ­family, 101, 106–107, 108, 109, 111, 116, 118 Farquhar, George, 43n15 Feenberg, Andrew, 2–3, 169 Felski, Rita, 166–167 Ferguson, Adam, 72–73 forceps, 173 form: ambivalent, 109, 117; gothic, 99, 101, 107, 111–112, 116, 118; heteronormative, 106, 110, 116, 117–118; material, 99, 102, 107; queer, 108, 110–112, 116, 117–118. See also chinoiserie Foucault, Michel, 14, 147, 165 Fox, Charles James, 126–127, 171 fragments, 107–109, 111–112, 118

Index Freud, Sigmund, 165 ­f uture, 102, 106–107 Galileo Galilei, 14–15, 17 ­Gamble, Rev. John, 130 Gay, John, 46, 52, 54; Works: The Beggar’s Opera, 54; Three Hours a­ fter Marriage, 46–47, 49, 51–56 genealogy, 102, 106–107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 116, 118 Gentleman’s Magazine, discussion of the telegraph in, 128, 137n18 geometry, 80, 82–83, 85, 87, 90, 94 georgic poetry, 172 Gibson, Thomas, 48 Giedion, Siegfried, 83, 95 Gillray, James, 126–127, 127, 171 Glissant, Édouard, 18 gloomth, 99, 102, 109, 110, 112, 118 Glorious Revolution, the, 34, 35, 147 gothic: architecture, 99, 102, 108–109, 112; fiction, 169; lantern, 99–102, 104–105, 106–110, 112–114, 116, 118; lit­er­a­ture, 99, 101, 107, 111, 116, 118; material culture, 99, 102, 107–110, 112, 114, 116, 118; technology, 99, 102, 109 Haraway, Donna, 10–11 Harrington, John, 85 Hartley, David, 91 Hazlitt, William, 141, 143 Hearne, Mary: attribution and identity, 36, 43–44n23, 172; epistolary fiction and, 36–37, 44n23, 44n26; gender and personal identity in, 36–38, 41; publication history, 43–44n23; romance chronotope and, 36, 38, 44n24; timepieces and material culture in, 37–38. Works: The Female Desert­­­ ers, 38, 44n23; The Lover’s Week, 36–38, 44n23 Hedingham C ­ astle, 102, 106–107, 109–112, 116–117, 118 Hegel, G.W.F., 143, 145, 148, 155; The Philos­ ophy of Right, 143 Heidegger, Martin, 87 Heinlein, Robert, 173 hermeneutics: cultural meaning of technology, 170; of suspicion, 167 heteronormativity, 101, 106–107, 112, 116, 117 history of technology, 164–174: cultural, 170–172; history of i­ magined uses of tech­ nology, 172–174; history of subjective ex­­­ perience of technology, 172; history of use vs. history of innovation, 171 Hobbes, Thomas, 27–28n8, 72, 140 Hogarth, William, 80, 90–94, 168. See also Analy­sis of Beauty, The

205 Hone, William, The Right Divine of Kings to Govern Wrong, 148, 149, 150, 151 Hooke, Robert, 2, 4, 91, 114, 129 Howard, Frances, 47, 49 Huawei, 123, 136 Hunter, William, 55–56 Hutcheson, Francis, 82 Huygens, Christian, and chronometry, 33, 36, 42n9 incest, 116, 117–118 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 169; The Mogul Tale, 169 industrialization, 79, 90, 91, 94–95 Industrial Revolution, 62–63, 71; Edmund Cartwright, 71, 75n11; James Hargreaves, 61–62, 71; John Kay, 64; Richard Arkwright, 61, 64, 71; Samuel Crompton, 64; William Lee, 63. See also textile industry industry, 5, 11 inheritance, 101, 106–107, 109, 111, 116, 117, 118 innovation, 170, 171 instruments, 14–18, 20–27. See also scien­­­tific instruments intellectual property, 63, 69–73, 75n14 internet, 155, 170 invention, 70–72, 75n14, 166, 170. See also intellectual property; patents Ireland, 64–65, 69–70 it-­narrative, 170 Jacobinism, 124, 126–127, 135–136, 170 Johnson, Samuel, 73 judgment, 19, 21–23, 25–26 Kent, William, 83 Kepler, Johannes, 14 knowledge: acquisition of, 5; application of, 5; l­ abor and history of, 62–63, 66, 68, 70–74; “pro­gress of knowledge,” 4–5; “pure knowledge,” 5; technological value of, 5; “useful knowledge,” 4 knowledge organ­ization, history of, 3 laboratories, 61, 62, 65, 165, 167 Lacan, Jacques, 165 Lakanal, Joseph, 125 Lambertini, Prospero, 21 landscape design, 83 Landy, Joshua, 166 latitude, calculation of, 32, 42n5 Latour, Bruno, 167–168 Leake, John, 49, 51 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 45n33, 67. See also calculating machines Levine, Caroline, 168

206 I n d e x Lewis, Michael, The Big Short, 139; film adaptation of, 157n1 liberal state: as machine or automaton, 140–144, 153–154, 156–157; postliberalism, 141, 153–156 lit­er­a­ture: literary form, 167–169; and science, 164, 174–175n1; uses of, 165–167, 169; uses of history of technology for literary studies, 165–169; uses of literary studies for history of technology, 169–174 Llull, Ramon, 67, 70 Locke, John, 21–23, 26, 27–28n8, 31–32, 38–41, 42n1, 45n33, 166 locomotive, 86 London Society of Arts, 5 longitude, calculation of, 32–33, 42nn5–7 Lunar Society, 171 machine(s): finance as, 140; poetic form as, 141, 147, 151, 160n47; the state as, 140–144, 148 magic lantern, 114–116 Mandel, Emily St. John, 174 Manley, Delarivier, 36 Marat, Jean-­Paul, 142–143, 154 marriage, repre­sen­ta­tions of, 35, 38 Marten, John, 49 Marx, Karl, 73, 77n64, 79, 80, 143–144, 148, 165 Marx, Leo, 170 masque, 141, 145, 147; antimasque, 145 Mechanics Magazine, 86 mechanization, 95 media, 141–143, 154, 155, 159n22, 163n112 medicine, 173, 174 microscopes, 6, 18, 114–115 Middleton, Thomas, and William Rowley, The Changeling, 46–47, 49, 51–54, 165 midwifery, 47–52, 55–56 Milton, John, 45n34, 71 Mizaldus, Antonius, 46–47 Moderns, 5, 11. See also Ancients vs. Moderns Morning Chronicle, 126 Morning Post, 126 Müller, Simone M., 173 Muñoz, José Esteban, 101, 110, 112, 118 Murray, Lord George, 128, 130 natu­ral philosophy, 14–16, 17, 24, 26–27, 165 nature, 5, 14, 18, 85, 87; “victory of art over,” 5 navigation. See latitude, calculation of; lon­­ gitude, calculation of Navigation Acts, 64–65 neoclassicism, 82–83

Neoplatonism, 30n59 New Criticism, 165 New Historicism, 169 New Science, 15 Newton, Isaac, 32, 42n1, 60–61 novel, as literary form, 32, 39–41, 44n24 obstetric forceps, 50–51, 56 occult, 28n16 Oldfield, Anne, 52 optical telegraph: adoption of in E ­ ngland, 124; adoption of in France, 125; Astley’s exhibition of, 126; British design and implementation, 128; coverage of in British newspapers, 125–126, 129; depiction of in Edgeworth’s “Lame Jervas,” 134–136; differences in French and En­glish design, 124; origins of, 123–125; Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s invention of, 129–131; as a symbol of Jacobinism, 127. See also telegraph Oswald, James, 173 Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man, 142 Parker, E., 46, 54 Pascal, Blaise, 67, 71. See also calculating machines patchwork aesthetic, 108 patents, 70–72, 75n14. See also intellectual property; invention Paul, Jean, 69 Pegasus spyware, 123 Penkethman, William, 55 personal identity: gender and ideas of, 38, 41; in Locke, 34, 45n33; and the novel, 39–40 Peter, John, 68, 70, 72, 77n45 Peterloo Massacre, 144, 148, 160n67 phantasmagoria, 116 philosophy, 4. See also science studies Pitt, William (the younger), 124–126 Platonism, 154, 156 Pope, Alexander, 2, 46–47, 49, 51–56, 68, 72–73; Three Hours a­ fter Marriage, 46–47, 49, 51–56 postcritique, 167 posthumanism, 73–74, 78n84 pre­sent, the, as a temporal concept, 32, 39, 41 Priestley, Joseph, 1 printing press, 2 programmatic writing, 67–70, 72 pro­gress, 5; in the arts, 5; in the sciences, 5; skepticism about, 10–11; story of, 5, 10 puppets, 16, 21 Pursell, Carroll W., 170

Index queer: aesthetic, 109, 116; form, 108, 110–112, 116, 117–118; method, 101, 108, 118; studies, 168; theory, 100–101, 106, 110, 111; time, 101, 106, 107, 109, 110–112; worldmaking, 110, 111, 116, 118 Rabelais, François, 67 racism, 118 radio, 170 railways, 143–144, 146, 148, 159n32, 170 ­recipes, instructions in, 36 reformism, 145, 147–148 republicanism, 140–141, 144, 146, 155–156, 159n22 Richardson, Samuel, 44n26 Robbins, John, 169 Rocaille, 83 romance. See amatory fiction and romance Romanticism, 143, 152–153 Rouquet, Jean Andre, 85, 90 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 152–153, 157; The Social Contract, 140 Royal Society of London for Improving Natu­ral Knowledge, 4–5, 60–61, 64–65, 67, 86 Schmitt, Carl, 142, 153 science studies, 3–4, 167, 169–170, 174; actor-­network theory, 167, 168, 172; sociology of scientific knowledge, 167; Strong Programme, 167 scientific instruments, 165, 169 scientific practice, 1–2 scientists, 3, 79, 114, 164, 167 Scriblerus, Martin. See Pope, Alexander Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 110 self-­driving vehicles, 144, 151–153 sense organs, 15, 18, 22 senses, 15–16, 22–23, 26 sensory perception, 15–17, 19, 21 serpentine style, 80, 81, 82–83, 86, 87, 88, 89–90, 91, 92, 95–96n10 Serres, Michel, 90 Shadwell, Thomas, 2 Shaftesbury, Lord (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 82 Shakespeare, William, 15, 27; The Tempest, 139 Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer, 1–2, 169 Sharp, Jane, 48 Shelley, Mary, 154 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 140, 151, 153, 162n109, 165; interest in science, 141, 144, 151, 156–157. Works: The Mask of Anarchy, 141, 144–148, 151–152; Posthumous Poems, 154; Prometheus Unbound, 144; The Triumph of Life, 141–142, 148, 151–157 Shenstone, William, 83

207 Sherman, Stuart, 31, 36, 40 Shipley, William, 5 Simondon, Gilbert, 94–95 Sinibaldi, Giovanni, 48 skepticism, 7, 10, 11, 23, 25, 55, 155 Smellie, William, 55–56 Smiles, Samuel, 3 Smollett, Tobias, 173; The Adventures of Fer­ dinand Count Fathom, 173 sociology of scientific knowledge. See sci­­­ ence studies Socrates, 93 space and spatialization as a way of thinking about time, 31–33, 41 spectacle, 141, 145, 152–154 Spectator, The, 68, 70 spectre, 111 spiders, 65–66, 68–69, 73–74; Arachne, 65, 68. See also vermin Sprat, Thomas, 27n8 stained glass, 99, 102, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112 steam engine, 3, 7, 8, 11, 79–80, 82, 87–90, 168–169 steam power, 141, 144, 146, 148, 152 Steele, Richard, 52 Sterne, Laurence, 82, 91–94, 168, 169, 172; Tristram Shandy, 82, 91–94, 168, 172, 173 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 172 Stoermer, Eugene, 79 Strawberry Hill, 168 Strawberry Hill House, 99, 102–107, 108–110, 112–114, 116, 118 Strong Programme. See science studies Sultan, Tipu, 172–173, 173–174; Edgeworth’s depictions of in “Lame Jervas,” 132–136; as historical figure, 124, 133, 135 Swift, Jonathan, correspondence, 64–65, 69–70, 76n25. Works: The ­Battle of the Books, 68; Gulliver’s Travels, 2, 5–6, 60–73; “Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” 70; A Tale of a Tub, 68–70, 72–73; “A Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the Mind,” 67 technology, 14–18, 22, 26–27, 27n6, 29n22; advances in, 5; computers, 2; gothic, 99, 102, 109; history of, 3–4; and innovation, 5, 10–11; “literary,” 1–3; and nationalism, 5; optical, 109, 114–116; “practical arts,” 4; of queer time, 101, 112; reception of, 3; sci­ entific, 114; techne, 4 telegraph, 3, 7, 123–136; Britain’s first telegraph line, 129; Dibdin’s song about, 128; electrical, 173; French, 125, 126, 128, 130; Lovell Edgeworth and, 124, 129–131, 132, 134–135; Murray’s, 128; network, 124, 126, 129; optical, 9, 123–124, 125, 170–171, 172–173

208 I n d e x teleology, 106, 108 telescopes, 6, 14, 15, 18, 114–115, 124, 131 Teltscher, Kate, 133 textile industry, 61–66, 69–74, 75n12, 76n21; drawloom, 62, 65–66; silk, 62, 65–66; spinning, 63–66, 75n12, 76n21; weaving, 62–66, 69, 75n12. See also Industrial Revolution textile loom, 3, 7, 8, 64, 66, 69, 71, 75n11 Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 52, 55 thermometer, in “Lame Jervas,” 132 Thompson, E. P., 172, 173 ­ astle of IndoThomson, James, 173; The C lence, 173 time: developmental, 107; heteronormative, 101, 106, 117; of inheritance. 106–107, 109, 111; queer, 101, 106, 107, 109, 110–111; para­ noid, 110 time, literary: in narrative and the novel, 32, 36–41, 44n24; unity of, in drama, 32, 34–35, 43n15 timekeeping technology: affordability and availability of, 33, 35–36, 43n20; clocks, pendulum, 33, 42n9; clockwork components, regulator and escapement, 33; in domestic life, 35–36, 37–38, 43n20; ­England at vanguard of, 32–33, 35–36, 43n9; Protestant countries and, 42n9; units of time and precision of mea­sure­ ment, 33, 36, 43n13; watches, accuracy and mechanism of, including repeaters, 33, 36, 43n13; watch, appearances in lit­er­a­ture, 34, 37. See also day, mea­sure­ment of Turner, Henry S., 167, 169 Tworek, Heidi, 173 unities, neoclassical. See ­under time, literary Vaucanson, Jacques de, 61–62, 66, 75n11, 85, 87

Venette, Nicolas, 48–49 Vere f­ amily, 99, 102, 104–107, 109, 118 vermin, 65–66, 68–69, 73–74 virginity, testing of, 46–56 virtual witnessing, 2 visual culture, 88 vitalism, 156, 162n109, 163n112 Walpole, Horace, 99, 102–107, 108–110, 112–114, 116, 118, 168, 169, 171; gothic lantern of, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107–110, 112, 114, 116, 118, 168, 171. Works: The ­Castle of Otranto, 99, 101, 107, 109, 110–112, 116, 117, 168; A Description of the Villa . . . ​at Strawberry-­Hill, 99, 102, 105, 112, 113; The Mysterious ­Mother, 101, 116–118 watches and clocks. See timekeeping technology Waterloo, 140, 143, 152 Watt, Ian, 32, 39 Watt, James, 10, 79–80, 91, 93–95, 168–169, 171; design improvements to steam engine, 79–80, 91, 93–95, 168; Watt’s linkage, 80, 81, 82, 88–90, 89 wax: figures, 16, 21, 24; magic, 21; meta­phor, 22–24; museums, 21; as substance, 20–23, 26 Webster, John, 16–18, 20, 22–27, 165, 170 Wecker, Johann Jacob, 47 Wharton, Joanna, 135 Whig historiography, 35 Whitehall Eve­ning Post, 129, 137n19 Whitehead, Colson, 174 Williams, Raymond, 172 Williams, Rosalind, 172 windmill, 87, 170 ­women writers and the repre­sen­ta­tions of time, 36–38, 41 World War II, 174